]> BibSonomy publications for /bibtex/2191a5d3e4843c16323af4fd8c72c8671/tmalsburg http://www.bibsonomy.org/burst/bibtex/2191a5d3e4843c16323af4fd8c72c8671/tmalsburg BibSonomy BuRST Feed for /bibtex/2191a5d3e4843c16323af4fd8c72c8671/tmalsburg 2008-10-12T00:40:14+02:00 Memory overload in sentence comprehension: Evidence from English and German (draft) http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2191a5d3e4843c16323af4fd8c72c8671/tmalsburg tmalsburg 2007-10-02T12:34:40+02:00 empiricalstudy grammaticality memoryload sentenceprocessing workingmemory
PDF Memory overload in sentence comprehension: Evidence from English and German (draft)
Shravan Vasishth and Katja Suckow and Richard Lewis and Sabine Kern (2007)
to empiricalstudy grammaticality memoryload sentenceprocessing workingmemory on 2007-10-02 12:34:40 ]]> OctoberMemory overload in sentence comprehension: Evidence from English and German (draft)2007empiricalstudy grammaticality memoryload sentenceprocessing workingmemory 12007-10-02 12:34:40.0Four experiments address the surprising finding by Gibson and Thomas (1999) that omitting the middle verb in a double center embedding results in an illusion of grammaticality. The explanation for this illusion is working-memory overload, which leads to the comprehender forgetting the prediction of the verb. The consequence is a failure to notice the ungrammaticality. The evidence for this online effect, however, is based on an offline acceptability rating study involving English. We present English self-paced reading (SPR) and eyetracking data that provide online evidence for the forgetting explanation. We also present German SPR and eyetracking studies that furnish evidence consistent with memory overload effects but inconsistent with the forgetting hypothesis. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference arises due to the head-final nature of German: since head-final stuctures are more frequent in German subordinate clauses than in English, predictions of upcoming verbs are not as easily forgotten as in English, even in the face of memory overload. These results have important implications for localitybased theories of memory overload.