Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, University of MichiganInstitute for Linguistics, University of Potsdam.
Cogn Sci. 2005 May 6;29(3):375-419. doi: 10.1207/s15516709cog0000_25.
We present a detailed process theory of the moment-by-moment working-memory retrievals and associated control structure that subserve sentence comprehension. The theory is derived from the application of independently motivated principles of memory and cognitive skill to the specialized task of sentence parsing. The resulting theory construes sentence processing as a series of skilled associative memory retrievals modulated by similarity-based interference and fluctuating activation. The cognitive principles are formalized in computational form in the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) architecture, and our process model is realized in ACT-R. We present the results of 6 sets of simulations: 5 simulation sets provide quantitative accounts of the effects of length and structural interference on both unambiguous and garden-path structures. A final simulation set provides a graded taxonomy of double center embeddings ranging from relatively easy to extremely difficult. The explanation of center-embedding difficulty is a novel one that derives from the model' complete reliance on discriminating retrieval cues in the absence of an explicit representation of serial order information. All fits were obtained with only 1 free scaling parameter fixed across the simulations; all other parameters were ACT-R defaults. The modeling results support the hypothesis that fluctuating activation and similarity-based interference are the key factors shaping working memory in sentence processing. We contrast the theory and empirical predictions with several related accounts of sentence-processing complexity.
我们提出了一个详细的工作记忆检索及其相关控制结构的过程理论，这些结构为句子理解服务。该理论源自独立激发的记忆和认知技能原理在句子解析这一专门任务中的应用。由此产生的理论将句子处理视为一系列受基于相似性干扰和波动激活调制的熟练联想记忆检索。认知原则在自适应思维控制（ACT-R）架构中以计算形式形式化，我们的过程模型在 ACT-R 中实现。我们提出了 6 组模拟的结果：5 组模拟提供了长度和结构干扰对明确和花园路径结构的影响的定量说明。最后一组模拟提供了从相对容易到极其困难的双中心嵌入的分级分类法。中心嵌入困难的解释是新颖的，它源自模型完全依赖于在没有显式序列信息表示的情况下区分检索线索。所有拟合都是在仅固定一个自由缩放参数的情况下在模拟中获得的；所有其他参数都是 ACT-R 的默认值。建模结果支持这样的假设，即波动激活和基于相似性的干扰是塑造句子处理中工作记忆的关键因素。我们将该理论和经验预测与句子处理复杂性的几个相关解释进行了对比。
