Tijn Schmitz: Memory retrieval in presupposition processing: 3 eye-tracking experiments

Memory plays an important role in the interpretation of so-called linguistic dependencies, such as pronouns, reflexives or subject-verb agreement. For instance, in the sentence “The key to the cabinets is rusty.”, the singular form of the verb “is” is dependent on the singular form of the subject “the key”. A theory of memory that has been particularly influential in the study of the processing of these elements is cue-based retrieval. The theory assumes that dependencies are resolved on the basis of cues, that can match or mismatch the element that should resolve the dependency. Partially matching distractors, such as “the cabinets” in the example, which is also a noun but plural, can cause interference during processing.

So far, cue-based retrieval has predominantly been tested on intra-sentential examples and on syntactic phenomena, such as subject-verb agreement. Little is known about memory retrieval in dependencies that operate across a discourse. Therefore, I ran three eye-tracking experiments that examined the predictions of cue-based retrieval in discourse. In particular, I studied the processing of the resolution of presuppositions, which are highly dependent on information in the discourse. For instance, in “John went running. Mary went running, too.” the presupposition trigger “too” indicates that there was another person running and that this information can be found in the preceding discourse. The experiments show interference effects that are similar to effects found for syntactic phenomena, and indicate partial support for the use of cue-based retrieval in discourse processing and presupposition resolution.

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