Rawson, K. A. (2007). Testing the shared resource assumption in theories of text processing. Cognitive Psychology, 54(2), 155-183.

Rawson, K.

2007

Rawson, K. A. (2007). Testing the shared resource assumption in theories of text processing. Cognitive Psychology, 54(2), 155-183.

2a

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either more or less difficult to parse. Results from a lexical decision task suggested that readers formed the causal inferences when the syntactic structure was less difficult to parse but that inferencing was constrained when syntactic structure was more difficult. Follow-up experiments suggested that this interference was not due to inferior output of the syntactic parser nor to the increased demands of difficult syntax interfering with maintenance of information needed to form the inference. The results suggest insufficient resources were available for the operation of inference processes due to the increased demands of syntactic parsing, consistent with the shared resource assumption.

Participants were as successful at extracting information from the main clause in the ambiguous condition as they were in the unambiguous condition, suggesting that any contribution of inferior main clause output to constrained inferencing in the ambiguous condition was minimal.

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