Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

During sentence processing, comprehenders have to maintain a mapping between lexical items and their position in the sentence (syntactic position). We propose a model of morpheme-position binding in working memory, based on models such as 'serial-order-in-a-box' and its SOB-complex-span version. Like those working memory models, our sentence processing version derives a range of attested memory interference effects from the process of item-position binding. We present simulation results capturing similarity-based interference and item-distortion. These two major classes of interference effects have not received a unified account before, and are not fully captured by cue-based retrieval models.