TY  - JOUR
A1  - Husain, Samar
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Srinivasan, Narayanan
T1  - Strong expectations cancel locality effects: Evidence from Hindi
JF  - PLoS one
N2  - Expectation-driven facilitation (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and locality-driven retrieval difficulty (Gibson, 1998, 2000; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are widely recognized to be two critical factors in incremental sentence processing; there is accumulating evidence that both can influence processing difficulty. However, it is unclear whether and how expectations and memory interact. We first confirm a key prediction of the expectation account: a Hindi self-paced reading study shows that when an expectation for an upcoming part of speech is dashed, building a rarer structure consumes more processing time than building a less rare structure. This is a strong validation of the expectation-based account. In a second study, we show that when expectation is strong, i.e., when a particular verb is predicted, strong facilitation effects are seen when the appearance of the verb is delayed; however, when expectation is weak, i.e., when only the part of speech "verb' is predicted but a particular verb is not predicted, the facilitation disappears and a tendency towards a locality effect is seen. The interaction seen between expectation strength and distance shows that strong expectations cancel locality effects, and that weak expectations allow locality effects to emerge.
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0100986
SN  - 1932-6203
VL  - 9
IS  - 7
PB  - PLoS
CY  - San Fransisco
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hofmeister, Philip
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Distinctiveness and encoding effects in online sentence comprehension
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - In explicit memory recall and recognition tasks, elaboration and contextual isolation both facilitate memory performance. Here, we investigate these effects in the context of sentence processing: targets for retrieval during online sentence processing of English object relative clause constructions differ in the amount of elaboration associated with the target noun phrase, or the homogeneity of superficial features (text color). Experiment 1 shows that greater elaboration for targets during the encoding phase reduces reading times at retrieval sites, but elaboration of non-targets has considerably weaker effects. Experiment 2 illustrates that processing isolated superficial features of target noun phrases-here, a green word in a sentence with words colored white-does not lead to enhanced memory performance, despite triggering longer encoding times. These results are interpreted in the light of the memory models of Nairne, 1990, 2001, 2006, which state that encoding remnants contribute to the set of retrieval cues that provide the basis for similarity-based interference effects.
KW  - encoding
KW  - retrieval
KW  - similarity
KW  - distinctiveness
KW  - sentence processing
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01237
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 5
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -