Online reflexive resolution and interference.

A reflexive referentially depends on another NP. Long-standing inquiries in sentence processing literature revolve around whether and how forming this coreference relation during online sentence processing is susceptible to similarity-based interference. To address these questions, we conducted four...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language, Cognition & Neuroscience Vol. 39; no. 4; pp. 513 - 527
Main Authors: Fujita, Hiroki, Yoshida, Masaya
Format: research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd May2024
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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Summary:A reflexive referentially depends on another NP. Long-standing inquiries in sentence processing literature revolve around whether and how forming this coreference relation during online sentence processing is susceptible to similarity-based interference. To address these questions, we conducted four experiments using L-maze tasks. The results revealed (delayed) interference in ungrammatical sentences, indicating facilitatory interference. We also found that structural information associated with a distractor and related to clause finiteness may influence memory retrieval. Interference effects were not observed in grammatical sentences across all experiments. These results suggest that online reflexive resolution may be susceptible to interference only when the reflexive mismatches its structurally accessible antecedent in features, and that structural information may influence how a distractor interferes with memory retrieval during online sentence processing.