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CNL Lunch Talks
Ming Xiang & Brian Dillon Thursday Feb 15th 2007, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall Intrusive Licensing Effects: Comparing Negative Polarity and Reflexives Understanding the role of memory structures in the completion of long-distance dependencies (LDD) is essential to understanding human sentence processing. Many recent studies have demonstrated that memory retrieval in LDD is sometimes subject to similarity-based interference, including effects of ungrammatical 'intrusive licensors' for negative polarity items (NPIs) and reflexives. Although these intrusion effects may reflect either the format of structured memory representations or the retrieval processes that contact these representations, existing accounts typically lay the blame on retrieval processes. Here we present a within-subjects ERP comparison of the processing of reflexives and NPIs. Despite close structural parallels between the conditions, we find clear differences in the presence and time-course of grammaticality and intrusion effects, and conclude that intrusive licensing reflects temporary failures of specific representations rather than general retrieval processes. |