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PubMed · 17087585

Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading.

Peter C Gordon·Randall Hendrick·Marcus Johnson·Yoonhyoung Lee
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Abstract

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing.

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AttentionComprehensionConcept FormationEye MovementsHumansMemory, Short-TermPsycholinguisticsReaction TimeReadingSemanticsJournal ArticleResearch Support, N.I.H., ExtramuralResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

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Peter C Gordon, Randall Hendrick, Marcus Johnson, Yoonhyoung Lee. 2006. Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading.. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.32.6.1304

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