Browsing by Author "Tan, Yingying"

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    Semantic and syntactic interference in sentence comprehension and their relationship to working memory capactiy
    (2012) Tan, Yingying; Martin, Randi C.
    This study investigated the nature of the relationship between working memory (WM) and sentence processing by examining interference effects in sentence comprehension and relating those to performance on a set of WM tasks, executive function tasks, and vocabulary tests. For online sentence comprehension, semantic interference effects were negatively correlated with semantic retention capacity. Syntactic interference effects were negatively related only to reading span. These results are consistent with the multiple capacities account (Martin & Romani, 1994), which postulates that there are separable retention abilities for semantic, syntactic, and phonological information, with the first two being critical for sentence comprehension. For offline sentence comprehension, participants with better semantic STM, WM span, vocabulary, or Stroop performance showed less difficulty in semantic interference resolution. These results were consistent to some extent with multiple capacities account, the general resources account (Just & Carpenter, 1992) and retrieval-based interference account (Van Dyke, 2007). Keywords: Interference effect, Working memory capacity, Cue-based retrieval, Sentence processing
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    Semantic and Syntactic Interference in Sentence Comprehension: A Comparison of Working Memory Models
    (Frontiers Media S.A., 2017) Tan, Yingying; Martin, Randi C.; Van Dyke, Julie A.
    This study investigated the nature of the underlying working memory system supporting sentence processing through examining individual differences in sensitivity to retrieval interference effects during sentence comprehension. Interference effects occur when readers incorrectly retrieve sentence constituents which are similar to those required during integrative processes. We examined interference arising from a partial match between distracting constituents and syntactic and semantic cues, and related these interference effects to performance on working memory, short-term memory (STM), vocabulary, and executive function tasks. For online sentence comprehension, as measured by self-paced reading, the magnitude of individuals' syntactic interference effects was predicted by general WM capacity and the relation remained significant when partialling out vocabulary, indicating that the effects were not due to verbal knowledge. For offline sentence comprehension, as measured by responses to comprehension questions, both general WM capacity and vocabulary knowledge interacted with semantic interference for comprehension accuracy, suggesting that both general WM capacity and the quality of semantic representations played a role in determining how well interference was resolved offline. For comprehension question reaction times, a measure of semantic STM capacity interacted with semantic but not syntactic interference. However, a measure of phonological capacity (digit span) and a general measure of resistance to response interference (Stroop effect) did not predict individuals' interference resolution abilities in either online or offline sentence comprehension. The results are discussed in relation to the multiple capacities account of working memory (e.g., Martin and Romani, 1994; Martin and He, 2004), and the cue-based retrieval parsing approach (e.g., Lewis et al., 2006; Van Dyke et al., 2014). While neither approach was fully supported, a possible means of reconciling the two approaches and directions for future research are proposed.
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    The role of working memory in interference resolution during Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs)
    (2015-09-24) Tan, Yingying; Martin, Randi C.; Lane, David; Fischer-Baum, Simon; Shibatani, Matt
    Interference during sentence comprehension occurs when readers use semantic and syntactic cues to retrieve earlier sentence information to integrate with later information and intervening material partially matches these cues, resulting in more parsing difficulty. This thesis collected event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants processed Chinese sentences with semantic and syntactic interference to address two main questions: 1) When do semantic and syntactic interference effects occur and do they interact with each other? 2) What is the role of working memory (WM) mechanisms in interference resolution? Semantic and syntactic interference were examined during processing of the critical main clause verb (e.g., “complain”) that required the retrieval of a human subject noun. The degree of semantic interference was manipulated through varying the semantic plausibility of a distracting noun (e.g., human vs. non-human), and syntactic interference was manipulated through varying the distracting noun’s grammatical role in the relative clause (i.e., subject vs. object). Individual differences measures were collected on aspects of working memory, executive function, and verbal knowledge. Regarding the timing of interference effects, the ERP results at the critical verb showed negative anterior effects between 300 – 500 ms for both syntactic and semantic interference. Syntactic interference also induced a P600 effect and semantic interference also induced a late left anterior negativity. I interpret the early anterior negativities as reflecting a first stage process of detecting the semantic or syntactic interference, and the late ERPs as reflecting a second stage of reanalysis/revision during sentence processing. Importantly, the current results demonstrated that semantic processing plays an immediate and important role in Chinese, because the semantic interference effect was observed as early as the syntactic interference effect even when the distracting noun’s syntactic features strongly eliminated it from the distractor set. In contrast, semantic interference has been shown to be delayed and even blocked in previous English studies using similar materials. Regarding the role of WM in interference resolution, the present study supports a role of attentional control underlying sentence comprehension. Subjects with better resistance to proactive interference, as measured by a recent negatives task, had less difficulty in syntactic interference resolution, as indexed by a reduced mean amplitude of the P600 effect elicited by the high syntactic interference condition, even after controlling for their verbal knowledge and general processing speed. This result is consistent with the argument that attentional control helps subjects to recover from interference during later controlled aspects of sentence processing.