The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics

[ Article ]

Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 24, No. 0, pp.35-51

ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)

Print publication date 31 Jan 2024

Received 04 Nov 2023 Revised 27 Dec 2023 Accepted 12 Jan 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.24..202401.35

Argument Status and Retrieval Interference

Jeongho Lew ; Nayoun Kim

(first author) PhD student, Department of English Language and Literature Sungkyunkwan University 25-2, Sungkyunkwan-ro, Jongno-gu Seoul, Korea jhlew89@skku.edu
(corresponding author) Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature Sungkyunkwan University 25-2, Sungkyunkwan-ro, Jongno-gu Seoul, Korea nayoun@skku.edu

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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

It has been suggested that a cue-based retrieval mechanism is involved in the online processing of subject-verb dependency, according to which similarity-based interference is predicted to arise when there are more than one items in memory that match the cues for retrieval (Lewis et al. 2006). Interestingly, Van Dyke and McElree (2011) proposed that the argument status of an intervening non-target item modulates interference effects, such that a cue-matching intervening item in an argument position does not lead to interference effects by virtue of its distinctive syntactic encoding. This study aims to test this hypothesis by investigating whether facilitatory semantic interference effects occur when an intervening non-target item is in the direct object argument position. In a self-paced reading experiment, we found no reading time facilitation in the presence of a semantic cue-matching intervening item, when the target subject did not match the semantic cue provided by the verb. Together with Cunnings and Sturt’s (2023) observation that facilitatory interference effects occur when a semantic cue-matching intervening item is inside an adjunct prepositional phrase, our findings provide further supporting evidence for Van Dyke and McElree’s (2011) hypothesis that the argument status of an intervening item influences interference effects.

Keywords:

argument status, dependency formation, cue-based retrieval, interference effect

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2023S1A5A8079483).

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