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 NP type manipulation had highly significant effects on all of our measures of reading times, with names being read more quickly than descriptions. More important, no reading time measures, whether reflecting early processing or later processing, showed a significant effect of whether the two critical NPs in the sentence were of the same type. Thus, the results provide no indication that similarity-based interference affected comprehension for the sentences, which stands in contrast to the highly reliable interaction of NP type and extraction type observed in experiment 1.

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