Sentence comprehension is mediated by content-addressable memory structures.
Studies of working memory demonstrate that some forms of information are retrieved by a content-addressable mechanism (McElree & Dosher, 1989; McElree, 1996, 1998), whereas others require a slower search-based mechanism (McElree & Dosher, 1993). Measures of the speed and accuracy of processing sentences with filler-gap dependencies demonstrate that the probability of maintaining a representation of a filler item decreases as additional material is processed, but that the speed with which a preserved representation is accessed is unaffected by the amount of interpolated material. These results suggest that basic binding operations in sentence comprehension are mediated by a content-addressable memory system.
McElree
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Department of Psychology, New York University 10003-6634, USA. bdm@psych.nyu.edu
D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008960:Models, Psychological; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors