Troyer Melissa, Hofmeister Philip, Kutas Marta
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California at San Diego La Jolla, CA, USA.
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University Providence, RI, USA.
Front Psychol. 2016 Mar 15;7:374. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00374. eCollection 2016.
Language comprehension requires access to stored knowledge and the ability to combine knowledge in new, meaningful ways. Previous work has shown that processing linguistically more complex expressions ('Texas cattle rancher' vs. 'rancher') leads to slow-downs in reading during initial processing, possibly reflecting effort in combining information. Conversely, when this information must subsequently be retrieved (as in filler-gap constructions), processing is facilitated for more complex expressions, possibly because more semantic cues are available during retrieval. To follow up on this hypothesis, we tested whether information distributed across a short discourse can similarly provide effective cues for retrieval. Participants read texts introducing two referents (e.g., two senators), one of whom was described in greater detail than the other (e.g., 'The Democrat had voted for one of the senators, and the Republican had voted for the other, a man from Ohio who was running for president'). The final sentence (e.g., 'The senator who the {Republican/Democrat}had voted for…') contained a relative clause picking out either the Many-Cue referent (with 'Republican') or the One-Cue referent (with 'Democrat'). We predicted facilitated retrieval (faster reading times) for the Many-Cue condition at the verb region ('had voted for'), where readers could understand that 'The senator' is the object of the verb. As predicted, this pattern was observed at the retrieval region and continued throughout the rest of the sentence. Participants also completed the Author/Magazine Recognition Tests (ART/MRT; Stanovich and West, 1989), providing a proxy for world knowledge. Since higher ART/MRT scores may index (a) greater experience accessing relevant knowledge and/or (b) richer/more highly structured representations in semantic memory, we predicted it would be positively associated with effects of elaboration on retrieval. We did not observe the predicted interaction between ART/MRT scores and Cue condition at the retrieval region, though ART/MRT interacted with Cue condition in other locations in the sentence. In sum, we found that providing more elaborative information over the course of a text can facilitate retrieval for referents, consistent with a framework in which referential elaboration over a discourse and not just local linguistic information directly impacts information retrieval during sentence processing.
语言理解需要调用存储的知识，并具备以新的、有意义的方式整合知识的能力。先前的研究表明，处理语言上更复杂的表达（如“德克萨斯州牧场主”与“牧场主”）会导致初始处理阶段阅读速度减慢，这可能反映了整合信息时的努力。相反，当随后必须检索此信息时（如在填充语-空位结构中），对于更复杂的表达，处理过程会更顺畅，这可能是因为在检索过程中有更多语义线索可用。为了验证这一假设，我们测试了分布在简短语篇中的信息是否同样能为检索提供有效的线索。参与者阅读介绍两个所指对象（如两位参议员）的文本，其中一个所指对象的描述比另一个更详细（如“民主党人投票支持了其中一位参议员，而共和党人投票支持了另一位，一位来自俄亥俄州且正在竞选总统的人”）。最后一句话（如“共和党人/民主党人投票支持的那位参议员……”）包含一个关系从句，挑选出多线索所指对象（用“共和党人”）或单线索所指对象（用“民主党人”）。我们预测在动词区域（“投票支持”），多线索条件下的检索会更顺畅（阅读时间更快），因为读者能理解“那位参议员”是动词的宾语。正如预测的那样，在检索区域观察到了这种模式，并且在句子的其余部分也持续存在。参与者还完成了作者/杂志识别测试（ART/MRT；斯坦诺维奇和韦斯特，1989），以此作为世界知识的替代指标。由于较高的ART/MRT分数可能表明（a）获取相关知识的经验更丰富和/或（b）语义记忆中的表征更丰富/结构更完善，我们预测它会与阐述对检索的影响呈正相关。尽管在句子的其他位置ART/MRT与线索条件存在交互作用，但在检索区域我们并未观察到预测的ART/MRT分数与线索条件之间的交互作用。总之，我们发现，在文本中提供更多详尽信息能够促进对所指对象的检索，这与一个框架相一致，即在语篇中进行指称阐述，而不仅仅是局部语言信息，会直接影响句子处理过程中的信息检索。
