Predictability of the Retrieval Site Does Not Modulate Interference: Evidence From Reflexive Attraction.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics

Background:

• Syntactic dependency formation in comprehension involves memory retrieval, which can cause interference errors like attraction.
• It is debated whether this interference is part of normal processing or a repair mechanism for failed predictions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the
• Error-driven Retrieval
• hypothesis regarding syntactic dependency formation.

Main Methods:

• Two reading time experiments and one offline interpretation experiment were conducted.
• The study examined the interaction between reflexive anaphor attraction and their predictability.

Main Results:

• The predictability of a reflexive dependency did not influence its susceptibility to interference effects during comprehension.
• Findings indicate that attraction is not solely triggered by prediction errors.

Conclusions:

• Syntactic attraction appears to be part of routine retrieval processes in language comprehension.
• The insensitivity of reflexives to distractors likely involves mechanisms beyond error-driven repair.