An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval

Cognitive Science

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 375-419

  Lewis, Richard L ^a   Vasishth, Shravan ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF POTSDAM   (Germany)

Author keywords

ACT R; Activation; Cognitive architectures; Cognitive modeling; Decay; Interference; Parsing; Sentence processing; Syntax; Working memory

Indexed keywords

EID: 21244438628     PISSN: 03640213     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog0000_25     Document Type: Article

References (125)

1. Aho, A. V., & Ullman, J. D. (1972). The theory of parsing, translation, and compiling: Vol.1. Parsing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
2. Altmann, G., & Steedman, M. (1988). Interaction with context during human sentence processing. Cognition, 30, 191-238.
3. Anderson, J. R. (1983). The architecture of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
4. Anderson, J. R. (2005). Human symbol manipulation within an integrated cognitive architecture. Cognitive Science, 29, 313-341.
5. Anderson, J. R., Bothell, D., Byrne, M. D., Douglass, S., Lebiere, C., & Qin, Y. (2005). An integrated theory of mind. Psychological Review.
6. Anderson, J. R., & Lebiere, C. (1998). Atomic components of thought. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
7. Anderson, J. R., & Matessa, M. P. (1997). A production system theory of serial memory. Psychological Review, 104, 728-748.
8. Anderson, J. R., & Reder, L. M. (1999). The fan effect: New results and new theories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 186-197.
9. Anderson, J. R., & Schooler, L. J. (1991). Reflections of the environment in memory. Psychological Science, 2, 396-408.
10. Bach, E., Brown, C., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (1986). Crossed and nested dependencies in German and Dutch: A psycholinguistic study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1, 249-262.
11. Bader, M., & Lasser, I. (1994). German verb-final clauses and sentence processing: Evidence for immediate attachment. In C. Clifton Jr., L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives in sentence processing (pp. 225-242). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
12. Bar-Hillel. (1953). A quasi-arithmetical notation for syntactic description. Language, 29, 47-58.
13. Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 279-362). New York: Wiley.
14. Blauberg, M. S., & Braine, M. D. S. (1974). Short-term memory limitations on decoding self-embedded sentences. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 102, 745-748.
15. Blumenthal, A. L. (1966). Observations with self-embedded sentences. Psychonomic Science, 6, 453-454.
16. Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 355-387.
17. Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.
18. Boland, J. E., & Blodgett, A. (2001). Understanding the constraints on syntactic generation: Lexical bias and discourse congruency effects on eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 391-411.
19. Boland, J. E., Lewis, R. L., & Blodgett, A. (2004). Distinguishing generation and selection of modifier attachments: Implications for lexicalized parsing. Manuscript submitted for publication.
20. Budiu, R., & Anderson, J. R. (2004). Interpretation-based processing: A unified theory of semantic sentence comprehension. Cognitive Science, 28, 1-44.
21. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
22. Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 1-15.
23. Chomsky, N. (1986). Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
24. Chomsky, N., & Miller, G. A. (1963). Introduction to the formal analysis of natural languages. In D. R. Luce, R. R. Bush, & E. Galanter (Eds.), Handbook of mathematical psychology (Vol. 2; pp. 269-322). New York: John Wiley.
25. Clifton, C., Jr., & Duffy, S. A. (2001). Sentence and text comprehension: Roles of linguistic structure. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 167-196.
26. Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Brain and Behavioral Sciences, 24, 87-114.
27. Cowper, E. A. (1976). Constraints on sentence complexity: A model for syntactic processing. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brown University, Providence, RI.
28. Crocker, M. W. (1996). Mechanisms for sentence processing (Research paper EUCCS/RP-70). Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science.
29. Crocker, M. W., & Brains, T. (2000). Wide-coverage probabilistic sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 647-669.
30. Dell, G. S., Burger, L. K., & Svec, W. R. (1997). Language production and serial order: A functional analysis and a model. Psychological Review, 104, 123-147.
31. Elman, J. L. (1990). Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science, 14, 179-211.
32. Ferreira, F., & Clifton, C., Jr. (1986). The independence of syntactic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 348-368.
33. Ferreira, F., & Henderson, J. M. (1991). Recovery from misanalyses of garden-path sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 725-745.
34. Fodor, J. A. (1983). Modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
35. Ford, M. (1983). A method for obtaining measures of local parsing complexity throughout sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 22, 203-218.
36. Frazier, L. (1987a). Sentence processing: A tutorial review. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and performance xii (pp. 559-585). Norwood, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
37. Frazier, L. (1987b). Syntactic processing: Evidence from Dutch. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 5, 519-560.
38. Frazier, L. (1989). Filler driven parsing: A study of gap filling in Dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 331-334.
39. Frazier, L. (1995). Constraint satisfaction as a theory of sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 6, 437-468.
40. Frazier, L. (1998). Getting there ... slowly. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27, 123-146.
41. Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178-210.
42. Gazdar, G. (1981). Unbounded dependencies and coordinate structure. Linguistic Inquiry, 12, 155-184.
43. Gazdar, G., Klein, E., Pullum, G. K., & Sag, I. A. (1985). Generalized phrase structure grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
44. Gibson, E. A. (1991). A computational theory of human linguistic processing: Memory limitations and processing breakdown (Tech. Rep. CMU-CMT-91-125). Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, Center for Machine Translation.
45. Gibson, E. A. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76.
46. Gibson, E. A. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Y. Miyashita, A. Mirantz, & W. O'Neil (Eds.), Image, language, brain (pp. 95-126). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
47. Gibson, E. A., & Thomas, J. (1997). The complexity of nested structures in English: Evidence for the syntactic prediction locality theory of linguistic complexity. Unpublished manuscript, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
48. Gibson, E. A., & Thomas, J. (1999). Memory limitations and structural forgetting: The perception of complex ungrammatical sentences as grammatical. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14, 225-248.
49. Givón, T. (1978). Definiteness and referentiality. In J. H. Greenberg, C. A. Ferguson, & E. A. Moravcsik (Eds.), Universals of human language: Vol. 4. Syntax (pp. 291-330). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
50. Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., & Johnson, M. (2001). Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 1411-1423.
51. Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., & Johnson, M. (2004). Effects of noun phrase type on sentence complexity. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 97-114.
52. Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., & Levine, W. H. (2002). Memory load interference in syntactic processing. Psychological Science, 13, 425-430.
53. Green, G. M. (1976). Main clause phenomena in subordinate clauses. Language, 52, 382-397.
54. Grodner, D., Gibson, E., & Tunstall, S. (2002). Syntactic complexity in ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 267-295.
55. Grodner, D. J., & Gibson, E. A. (in press). Consequences of the serial nature of linguistic input for sentential complexity. Cognitive Science.
56. Hagoort, P. (2003). How the brain solves the binding problem for language: A neurocomputational model of syntactic processing. NeuroImage, 20, S18-S29.
57. Hakes, D. T., & Cairns, H. S. (1970). Sentence comprehension and relative pronouns. Perception & Psychophysics, 8(1), 5-8.
58. Hakes, D. T., Evans, J. S., & Brannon, L. L. (1976). Understanding sentences with relative clauses. Memory and Cognition, 4, 283-290.
59. Hakuta, K. (1981). Grammatical description versus configurational arrangement in language acquisition: The case of relative clauses in Japanese. Cognition, 9, 197-236.
60. Hirose, Y., & Inoue, A. (1998). Ambiguities in parsing complex sentences in Japanese. In D. Hillert (Ed.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 31, pp. 71-93). New York: Academic.
61. Holmes, V. M., & O'Regan, J. K. (1981). Eye fixation patterns during the reading of relative clause sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20, 417-430.
62. Hooper, J. B., & Thompson, S. A. (1973). On the applicability of root transformations. Linguistic Inquiry, 4, 465-497.
63. Hudgins, J. C., & Cullinan, W. L. (1978). Effects of sentence structure on sentence elicited imitation responses. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 21, 809-819.
64. Inoue, A., & Fodor, J. D. (1995). Information-paced parsing of Japanese. In R. Mazuka & N. Nagai (Eds.), Japanese sentence processing (pp. 9-63). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
65. Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
66. Jurafsky, D. (1996). A probabilistic model of lexical and syntactic access and disambiguation. Cognitive Science, 20, 137-194.
67. Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. Psychological Review, 99, 122-149.
68. Kaan, E., & Vasic, N. (2004). Cross-serial dependencies in Dutch: Testing the influence of NP type on processing load. Memory & Cognition, 32, 175-184.
69. Kimball, J. (1973). Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition, 2, 15-47.
70. King, J., & Just, M. A. (1991). Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 580-602.
71. Konieczny, L. (2000). Locality and parsing complexity. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 627-645.
72. Konieczny, L., Hemforth, B., Scheepers, C., & Strube, G. (1997). The role of lexical heads in parsing: Evidence from German. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 307-348.
73. Korthals, C. (2001). Self embedded relative clauses in a corpus of German newspaper texts. In K. Striegnitz (Ed.), Proceedings of the Sixth ESSLLI Student Session (pp. 179-190). Helsinki, Finland: University of Helsinki.
74. Koster, J. (1978). Why subject sentences don't exist. In S. J. Keyser (Ed.), Recent transformational studies in European languages (pp. 53-64). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
75. Larkin, W., & Burns, D. (1977). Sentence comprehension and memory for embedded structure. Memory and Cognition, 5, 17-22.
76. Lewis, R. L. (1993). An architecturally-based theory of human sentence comprehension (Tech. Rep. CMU-CS-93-226). Retrieved March 18, 2005, from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rickl/Documents/thesis.pdf
77. Lewis, R. L. (1996). Interference in short-term memory: The magical number two (or three) in sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 93-115.
78. Lewis, R. L. (1998a). Leaping off the garden path: Reanalysis and limited repair parsing. In J. Fodor & F. Ferreira (Eds.), Reanalysis in sentence processing (pp. 247-285). Boston: Kluwer Academic.
79. Lewis, R. L. (1998b, March). Working memory in sentence processing: Retroactive and proactive interference in parsing. Paper presented at The 11th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New Brunswick, NJ.
80. Lewis, R. L. (2000). Specifying architectures for language processing: Process, control, and memory in parsing and interpretation. In M. W. Crocker, M. Pickering, & C. Clifton Jr. (Eds.), Architectures and mechanisms for language processing (pp. 56-89). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
81. Lovett, M. (1998). Choice. In J. R. Anderson & C. Lebiere (Eds.), The atomic components of thought (pp. 255-296). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
82. MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54.
83. MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703.
84. Marks, L. E. (1968). Scaling of grammaticalness of self-embedded English sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 7, 965-967.
85. McElree, B. (1993). The locus of lexical preference effects in sentence comprehension: A time-course analysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 536-571.
86. McElree, B. (1998). Attended and non-attended states in working memory: Accessing categorized structures. Journal of Memory and Language, 38, 225-252.
87. McElree, B., & Dosher, B. A. (1989). Serial position and set size in short-term memory: Time course of recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 346-373.
88. McElree, B., & Dosher, B. A. (1993). Serial retrieval processes in the recovery of order information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 291-315.
89. McElree, B., Foraker, S., & Dyer, L. (2003). Memory structures that subserve sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 67-91.
90. McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (2003). Meaning through syntax: Language comprehension and the reduced relative clause construction. Psychological Review, 110, 490-525.
91. Meyer, D. E., & Kieras, D. E. (1997). A computational theory of executive cognitive processes and multiple-task performance: Part 1. Basic mechanisms. Psychological Review, 104, 3-65.
92. Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
93. Miller, G. A., & Chomsky, N. (1963). Finitary models of language users. In D. R. Luce, R. R. Bush, & E. Galanter (Eds.), Handbook of mathematical psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 419-492). New York: Wiley.
94. Miller, G. A., & Isard, S. (1964). Free recall of self-embedded English sentences. Information and Control, 7, 292-303.
95. Mitchell, D. C. (1994). Sentence parsing. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 375-409). San Diego: Academic.
96. Newell, A. (1973). Production systems: Models of control structures. In W. G. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing (pp. 463-526). New York: Academic Press.
97. Newell, A. (1990). Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
98. Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
99. Pollard, C., & Sag, I. (1994). Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
100. Schabes, Y., & Joshi, A. K. (1991). Parsing in lexicalized tree adjoining grammar. In M. Tomita (Ed.), Current issues in parsing technologies (pp. 25-47). Boston: Kluwer Academic.
101. Schlesinger, I. M. (1975). Why a sentence in which a sentence in which a sentence is embedded is embedded is difficult. International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 53-66.
102. Sheldon, A. (1974). The role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, 272-281.
103. Simon, H. A. (1974, February 8). How big is a chunk? Science, 183, 482-488.
104. Srinivas, B., & Joshi, A. K. (1999). Supertagging: An approach to almost parsing. Computational Linguistics, 25, 237-265.
105. Stabler, E. P. (1994). The finite connectivity of linguistic structure. In C. Clifton Jr., L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives in sentence processing (pp. 303-336). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. (An earlier version of this paper appeared in UCLA Occasional Papers No. 11.)
106. Steedman, M. (1996). Surface structure and interpretation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
107. Steedman, M. (2000). The Syntactic Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
108. Stevenson, S. (1994). Competition and recency in a hybrid network model of syntactic disambiguation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 23, 295-322.
109. Tabor, W., Juliano, C., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Parsing in a dynamical system: An attractor-based account of the interaction of lexical and structural constraints in sentence processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 211-272.
110. Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-1634.
111. Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Garnsey, S. M. (1994). Semantic influences in parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 285-318.
112. Ullman, M. T. (2004). Contributions of memory circuits to language: The declarative/procedural model. Cognition, 92, 231-270.
113. Van Dyke, J. A. (2002). Retrieval effects in sentence parsing and interpretation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.
114. Van Dyke, J. A., & Lewis, R. L. (2003). Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment and repair: A cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalyzed ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 285-316.
115. van Noord, G. (1997). An efficient implementation of the head-corner parser. Computational Linguistics, 23, 425-456.
116. Vannest, J., Newman, A., Polk, T. A., Lewis, R. L., Newport, E. L., & Bavelier, D. (2004). fMRI evidence that some, but not all, derived words are decomposed during lexical access. Manuscript submitted for publication.
117. Vannest, J., Polk, T. A., & Lewis, R. L. (2003, in revision). Dual-route processing of complex words: New fMRI evidence from derivational suffixation. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.
118. Vasishth, S. (2003a). Quantifying processing difficulty in human sentence parsing: The role of decay, activation, and similarity-based interference. In Proceedings of the European Cognitive Science Conference (Osnabrück). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
119. Vasishth, S. (2003b). Working memory in sentence comprehension: Processing Hindi center embeddings. New York: Garland.
120. Vasishth, S., Cramer, I., Scheepers, C., & Wagner, J. (2003). Does increasing distance facilitate processing? In Proceedings of the 16th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. MIT, Cambridge, MA (Available from: ftp://ftp.coli.uni-sb.de/pub/people/vasishth/wip.html)
121. Vasishth, S., Scheepers, C., Uszkoreit, H., Wagner, J., & Kruijff, G. J. M. (2004, March). Constraint defeasibility and concurrent constraint satisfaction in human sentence processing. Paper presented at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Cambridge, MA.
122. Vosse, T., & Kempen, G. (2000). Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: A computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar. Cognition, 75, 105-143.
123. Wang, M. D. (1970). The role of syntactic complexity as a determiner of comprehensibility. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9, 398-404.
124. Wickelgren, W. A., Corbett, A. T., & Dosher, B. A. (1980). Priming and retrieval from short-term memory: A speed-accuracy trade-off analysis. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 387-404.
125. Yngve, V. H. (1960). A model and an hypothesis for language structure. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 104, 444-466.