Sentence Processing Deficits and Memory Retrieval: A Cue-Based Parsing Approach

摘要

This symposium presents an overview of the recent cue-based parsing approach to sentence processing (Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006) and demonstrates its application to understanding disorders of comprehension and production. The cue-based parsing approach draws on recent theories of working memory (WM) that posit a very limited capacity in the focus of attention and assume that access to information outside this focus requires cue-based retrieval. In its application to sentence processing, the approach assumes that comprehension involves a series of retrievals in which syntactic and semantic cues are used to access WM representations of earlier sentence information to link with later information. Comprehension difficulty increases when non-target information provides a partial match to these cues. The approach provides a means of accounting for aphasie patients9 difficulty in understanding and producing different sentence types depending on the sentences, degree of semantic and syntactic interference and the patients9 cognitive resources for dealing with this interference.