Competition and working memory in sentence reading: Evidence from Spanish

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Syntactic cues guide sentence interpretation, but their relative importance and interaction are not fully understood.
• Working memory (WM) capacity may influence the processing of competing linguistic information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the preference and competition between subject-verb agreement and animacy cues in Spanish sentence reading.
• To examine the role of working memory (WM) in resolving cue competition during sentence comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Participants read Spanish noun-verb-noun sentences and performed an agent assignment task.
• Reading times were analyzed to identify cue competition effects.
• Participants were categorized by WM span (high vs. low) to assess its influence.

Main Results:

• Subject-verb agreement was a preferred cue over animacy in agent assignment.
• Cue competition occurred when subject-verb agreement and animacy suggested different agents, leading to longer reading times.
• High-WM readers utilized animacy and showed no interference, while low-WM readers relied on subject-verb agreement and experienced interference.

Conclusions:

• Subject-verb agreement is a dominant cue in Spanish sentence processing, but animacy also plays a role.
• Working memory capacity modulates the reliance on syntactic cues and the susceptibility to cue competition.
• Individual differences in WM significantly impact sentence comprehension strategies when faced with conflicting linguistic information.