ArticleFrontiers in psychology2016
When High-Capacity Readers Slow Down and Low-Capacity Readers Speed Up: Working Memory and Locality Effects.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 66 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Robust Effects of Working Memory Demand during Naturalistic Language Comprehension in Language-Selective Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Individual Differences in Cue Weighting in Sentence Comprehension: An Evaluation Using Approximate Bayesian Computation.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
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- Processing Sentences With Multiple Negations: Grammatical Structures That Are Perceived as Unacceptable.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Processing of ellipsis with garden-path antecedents in French and German: Evidence from eye tracking.PloS one · 2018Article
- Dependency Distance Differences across Interpreting Types: Implications for Cognitive Demand.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Article
- Dependency Resolution Difficulty Increases with Distance in Persian Separable Complex Predicates: Evidence for Expectation and Memory-Based Accounts.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We examined the effects of argument-head distance in SVO and SOV languages (Spanish and German), while taking into account readers' working memory capacity and controlling for expectation (Levy, 2008) and other factors. We predicted only locality effects, that is, a slowdown produced by increased dependency distance (Gibson, 2000; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). Furthermore, we expected stronger locality effects for readers with low working memory capacity. Contrary to our predictions, low-capacity readers showed faster reading with increased distance, while high-capacity readers showed locality effects. We suggest that while the locality effects are compatible with memory-based explanations, the speedup of low-capacity readers can be explained by an increased probability of retrieval failure. We present a computational model based on ACT-R built under the previous assumptions, which is able to give a qualitative account for the present data and can be tested in future research. Our results suggest that in some cases, interpreting longer RTs as indexing increased processing difficulty and shorter RTs as facilitation may be too simplistic: The same increase in processing difficulty may lead to slowdowns in high-capacity readers and speedups in low-capacity ones. Ignoring individual level capacity differences when investigating locality effects may lead to misleading conclusions.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.