Feature encoding modulates cue based retrieval: Modeling interference effects in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences
Studies on similarity based interference in subject verb agreement dependencies have found a consistent facilitatory effect in ungrammatical sentences but no conclusive effect in grammatical sentences. Existing models propose that interference is caused either by a faulty representation of the input (encoding based models) or by difficulty in retrieving the subject based on cues at the verb (retrieval based models) Neither class of model captures the observed patterns in human reading time data. We propose a new model that integrates a feature encoding mechanism into an existing cue based retrieval model. Our model outperforms the cue based retrieval model in explaining interference effect data from both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. These modeling results yield a new insight into sentence processing, encoding modulates retrieval. Nouns stored in memory undergo feature distortion, which in turn affects how retrieval unfolds during dependency completion.