TY - JOUR
T1 - Memory for linguistic features and the focus of attention
T2 - evidence from the dynamics of agreement inside DP
AU - Wagers, Matthew
AU - McElree, Brian
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health: [Grant Number HD-056200]. The authors acknowledge the support of NIH grant #HD-056200. Thanks to Kathy Akey for assistance in collecting data. The authors are grateful to the audience of the 22nd Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (University of California, Davis) for their helpful comments; to two anonymous reviewers for their insight and critical commentary; to Pranav Anand for his help parsing the Gigaword corpus; and to the following individuals for important contributions to the development of the project: Julie Van Dyke, Ellen Lau, Colin Phillips, Michael Shvartsman & Clare Stroud.
Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge the support of NIH grant #HD-056200. Thanks to Kathy Akey for assistance in collecting data. The authors are grateful to the audience of the 22nd Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (University of California, Davis) for their helpful comments; to two anonymous reviewers for their insight and critical commentary; to Pranav Anand for his help parsing the Gigaword corpus; and to the following individuals for important contributions to the development of the project: Julie Van Dyke, Ellen Lau, Colin Phillips, Michael Shvartsman & Clare Stroud.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The amount of information that can be concurrently maintained in the focus of attention is strongly restricted. The goal of this study was to test whether this restriction was functionally significant for language comprehension. We examined the time-course dynamics of processing determiner-head agreement in English demonstrative phrases. We found evidence that agreement processing was slowed when determiner and head were no longer adjacent, but separated by modifiers. We argue that some information is shunted nearly immediately from the focus of attention, necessitating its later retrieval. Plural, the marked feature value for number, exhibits better preservation in the focus of attention, however, than the unmarked value, singular.
AB - The amount of information that can be concurrently maintained in the focus of attention is strongly restricted. The goal of this study was to test whether this restriction was functionally significant for language comprehension. We examined the time-course dynamics of processing determiner-head agreement in English demonstrative phrases. We found evidence that agreement processing was slowed when determiner and head were no longer adjacent, but separated by modifiers. We argue that some information is shunted nearly immediately from the focus of attention, necessitating its later retrieval. Plural, the marked feature value for number, exhibits better preservation in the focus of attention, however, than the unmarked value, singular.
KW - Language comprehension
KW - focus of attention
KW - grammatical agreement
KW - number
KW - speed–accuracy trade-off (SAT)
KW - working memory
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85132654507&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85132654507&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/23273798.2022.2057559
DO - 10.1080/23273798.2022.2057559
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85132654507
SN - 2327-3798
VL - 37
SP - 1191
EP - 1206
JO - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
JF - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
IS - 9
ER -