Working memory constraints on syntactic ambiguity resolution as revealed by electrical brain responses

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Syntactic ambiguity resolution is crucial for language comprehension.
• Individual differences in memory capacity may influence parsing strategies.
• Event-related potentials (ERPs) offer insights into real-time cognitive processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how readers with varying memory spans parse temporarily ambiguous sentences.
• To examine the role of morphological case marking in resolving syntactic ambiguity.
• To compare processing strategies under different disambiguation conditions (late, immediate, early).

Main Methods:

• Utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to record brain activity during sentence reading.
• Compared high and low memory span readers' neural responses to subject vs. object relative clauses.
• Manipulated sentence structure and case marking for late, immediate, and early disambiguation.

Main Results:

• High memory span readers showed revision effects in late disambiguation, unlike low span readers.
• Both groups immediately used clear case marking at the relative pronoun for revision.
• Non-immediate revision effects were observed when case marking followed an ambiguous pronoun, influenced by German case ambiguity.

Conclusions:

• Morphological information is used immediately to resolve unambiguous syntactic ambiguity by both high and low memory span readers.
• Processing differences between memory span groups emerge primarily with extended ambiguous sentence regions.
• Sentence memory capacity modulates the utilization of disambiguating cues during real-time language processing.