Abstract
Studies of working memory demonstrate that some forms of information are retrieved by a content-addressable mechanism (McElree & Dosher, 1989; McElree, 1996, 1998), whereas others require a slower search-based mechanism (McElree & Dosher, 1993). Measures of the speed and accuracy of processing sentences with filler-gap dependencies demonstrate that the probability of maintaining a representation of a filler item decreases as additional material is processed, but that the speed with which a preserved representation is accessed is unaffected by the amount of interpolated material. These results suggest that basic binding operations in sentence comprehension are mediated by a content-addressable memory system.
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McElree, B. Sentence Comprehension Is Mediated by Content-Addressable Memory Structures. J Psycholinguist Res 29, 111–123 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005184709695
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005184709695