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Related Experiment Videos

Working memory contributions to relative clause attachment processing: a hierarchical linear modeling analysis.

Matthew J Traxler1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA. mjtraxler@ucdavis.edu

Memory & Cognition
|October 4, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Working memory capacity influences how readers process complex sentences. Higher working memory is linked to preferring the first noun in ambiguous relative clauses, contrary to previous findings.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Ambiguous relative clauses in sentences pose processing challenges.
  • Previous research suggests globally ambiguous clauses are processed faster than determinately attached ones.
  • Offline preferences for relative clause attachment vary with working memory capacity.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how working memory capacity moderates online sentence processing of relative clauses.
  • To examine the interaction between working memory and sentence ambiguity during real-time comprehension.
  • To reconcile conflicting findings on working memory and relative clause attachment preferences.

Main Methods:

  • Eye-movement monitoring experiment with participants reading sentences containing relative clauses.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Measurement of individual working memory capacity.
  • Hierarchical linear modeling to analyze the relationship between working memory and processing metrics.

    • Main Results:

    • Determinately attached sentences were more difficult to process than globally ambiguous ones.
    • Working memory capacity did not influence the processing of the relative clause itself.
    • Working memory capacity moderated the integration of the relative clause with the sentence context.
    • Higher working memory capacity correlated with a preference for attaching the relative clause to the first noun, contradicting prior offline studies.

    Conclusions:

    • Working memory capacity plays a crucial role in resolving syntactic ambiguity during sentence comprehension.
    • The findings challenge previous assumptions about the relationship between working memory and sentence processing preferences.
    • Online processing of relative clauses is modulated by working memory, affecting how readers integrate information.