ERIC Number: ED662449
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 347
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: 979-8-3841-0440-7
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Memory Knows Its Bounds: Encoding Contexts in Sentence Comprehension
Lalitha Balachandran
ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz
Segmentation is a cornerstone of language processing across levels of linguistic analysis, and yet, standard models of linguistic memory leave the role of higher-order segments in online comprehension understudied. This dissertation advances the Context-Sensitive Encoding (CSE) hypothesis: that implicit prosodic boundaries (Bader, 1998; J. Fodor, 1998, 2002b) serve to partition sentences into distinct encoding contexts via a temporal context mechanism (Howard & Kahana, 2002) that shifts a gradually evolving contextual representation bound to item encodings at unambiguously marked prosodic boundary positions. In a series of reading and recognition memory studies, we demonstrate the role of CSE using three segmented sentence structures as test cases: appositive relative clauses, which have been shown to display "bypassing" of sentence-medial segments during online comprehension (Dillon et al., 2017; S. Kim & Xiang, 2022, 2023), and two types of focus-sensitive coordination that can prosodically separate their coordinates ("not only…but also" and "…as well as…"). The studies establish two consequences of CSE during sentence processing: previous contextual states may be reinstated at later points (a mechanism we term "Reinstantiation"), and in limited cases, the contents of a targeted segment may be accessed to the exclusion of other sentence content following cue-based retrieval (termed "Context-Sensitive Retrieval"). The account proposed here ultimately argues that bypassing stems from the interaction between (i) shifting the encoding context at prosodic boundary positions and (ii) anticipating upcoming subject-verb dependencies. We argue that this interaction can entirely account for an effect that has previously been attributed to idiosyncratic discourse properties of appositives. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]
Descriptors: Memory, Cognitive Processes, Sentences, Reading Comprehension, Language Processing, Suprasegmentals, Reading Processes, Recognition (Psychology), Sentence Structure, Form Classes (Languages), Cues
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Publication Type: Dissertations/Theses - Doctoral Dissertations
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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