Maintaining Syntactic Positions and Thematic Roles in Memory

Abstract

This thesis investigates syntactic and thematic factors that contribute to interference in language comprehension during the resolution of subject-verb dependencies. One self-paced reading experiment and one speeded acceptability judgment task examined the mechanisms underlying subject retrieval operations using materials that leverage syntactically alternating Double Object (DO) and Prepositional Dative (PP) structures. The self-paced reading results suggest that arguments in the PP frame inhibit retrieval during thematic binding operations, but identical arguments in the DO frame do not. The acceptability judgment results indicate that arguments in both structures can engender facilitatory interference during number agreement processing in ungrammatical sentences. This thesis proposes an account of the present results, as well as a range of previous findings, involving a single set of retrieval cues, weighted with estimates of reliability according to the grammatical function of the retrieval operation. Such an account is consistent with a cue-integration model of language comprehension (Martin 2016), which links psycholinguistic theory with neurobiological models of perception. Additionally, this work demonstrates both inhibitory and facilitatory interference effects with identical structures, providing further evidence for central predictions of the cue-based retrieval model of sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth 2005).