Tan, Y. & Martin, R.
Psychology Department, Rice University, Houston, USA
During sentence processing, interference effects have been obtained when comprehenders have to retrieve earlier information to link with later information across intervening material with features that partially match the target information. For example, for the sentence, “The resident who the manager evicted complained loudly,” interference is obtained from “manager” when retrieving the subject of “complained” because “manager” is a syntactic subject and is semantically plausible as the agent of “complained.” The working memory resources involved in retrieval and interference resolution were investigated using an individual differences approach. Ninety-six subjects read sentences in a self-paced, phrase-by-phrase fashion followed by a comprehension question. The degree of semantic and syntactic interference in the intervening material was manipulated factorially. During sentence processing, semantic interference effects were negatively correlated with semantic retention capacity, even after partialling out vocabulary knowledge. Syntactic interference during sentence processing was related only to reading span, a complex measure which involves syntactic processing. A measure of phonological retention capacity was found to be unrelated to any of the interference effects. The results are consistent with a multiple capacities approach to verbal working memory that includes separable phonological, semantic, and syntactic components, with only the latter two being relevant for sentence comprehension.