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Related Experiment Videos

Memory-load interference in syntactic processing.

Peter C Gordon1, Randall Hendrick, William H Levine

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 27599-3270, USA. pcg@email.unc.edu

Psychological Science
|September 11, 2002
PubMed
Summary
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Syntactic processing relies on working memory, impacting sentence comprehension. Memory load and sentence complexity interact, showing interference effects during language processing.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Syntactic processing in language comprehension is debated regarding its modularity and reliance on general cognitive resources.
  • Working memory plays a crucial role in processing complex linguistic structures.
  • Information processing is subject to similarity-based interference, particularly in memory-intensive tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relationship between syntactic complexity, working memory load, and sentence comprehension.
  • To examine the influence of item type matching (common nouns vs. proper names) on performance under memory load.
  • To determine whether syntactic processing is modular or shares resources with other cognitive processes.

Main Methods:

  • A memory-load study where participants recalled words while reading sentences of varying syntactic complexity (object-extracted vs. subject-extracted clefts).

Related Experiment Videos

  • Manipulation of word type matching between the memory set and sentence content (common nouns vs. proper names).
  • Measurement of sentence comprehension performance under different conditions.

    • Main Results:

    • Sentence comprehension was significantly impaired for complex sentences compared to simpler ones.
    • This impairment was exacerbated when the word types in the memory load matched those in the sentence, indicating interference.
    • The findings suggest that syntactic processing draws upon shared working memory resources.

    Conclusions:

    • Syntactic processing is not a modular system; it recruits working memory resources used by other cognitive functions.
    • Similarity-based interference is a key factor in language comprehension, but can be mitigated by constructing coherent meaning representations.
    • Understanding these resource limitations and interference effects is crucial for models of language processing.