Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., Johnson, M., & Lee, Y. (2006). Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 32(6), 1304-1321.

Gordon, P.; Hendrick, R.; Johnson, M.; Lee, Y.

2006

Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., Johnson, M., & Lee, Y. (2006). Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 32(6), 1304-1321.

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The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing.

The results of this experiment show that object-extracted RCs are read more slowly than subject-extracted RCs. More important, the results show very clearly that the magnitude of this object-subject difference during the comprehension of an RC is reduced when the NP in the embedded clause is a name as compared with when it is a description.

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