Facilitating Memory Retrieval in Language Comprehension

Memory retrieval is an integral part of language comprehension. It is constantly necessary to remember what was said previously for purposes of building syntactic structures, interpreting anaphors, etc. The ease and success of retrieving this information from memory depends upon an array of factors: how long ago it was studied, the context in which it appeared, what occurred between the initial exposure and the memory retrieval, to name just a few.

This talk addresses how the amount of information in a linguistic expression affects the recall of that expression. Evidence from multiple self-paced reading studies supports the view that the amount of information encoded in linguistic entities impacts processing times at retrieval points in a variety of complex wh-dependency constructions, e.g. multiple wh-questions, weak island violations, CNPC violations, and nested dependencies. On the basis of this experimental data, I propose that linguistic elements that encode more information can aid processing by facilitating memory retrieval of those elements later. In other words, richer linguistic descriptions of discourse entities make recall of those entities easier (all else being equal). I consider various cognitive explanations for the memory facilitation, i.e. reduced interference, distinctiveness, increased study time, and activation boosting.