Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates the mechanism of memory retrieval in sentence processing, e.g. searching for an antecedent for thereflexive, e.g. himself or herself in English. Cue-based retrieval models (e.g. ACT-R, Lewis and Vasishth, 2005) predictthat such process is delayed when there is a distractor matching the retrieval cues, such as gender and number. However,this inhibitory interference effect was not found in a recent Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis of 49 experiments (Jgeret al., 2017).In two self-paced reading experiments, we provide additional evidence of the inhibitory interference effect in processingantecedent-reflexive dependencies. Reflexives and the following spillover regions were read slower when the distractorsgender matched the retrieval cue. The delay was more significant when the interference was retroactive, i.e. distractorswere located between the reflexive and its antecedent. The distractors prominence, which is related to its syntactic position,was not found to be a determinant in this process.