| How an object or event is described depends upon numerous factors that have been identified by prior research in linguistics, pragmatics, and psychology. What this prior research has not established, however, is what consequences the resulting choice of linguistic form has on subsequent comprehension processes. This dissertation begins with the assertion that the quantity of information encoded in a linguistic expression has an impact on the efficiency of subsequent retrieval processes that target the corresponding mental representation. In particular, I hypothesize that information processed during the encoding phase of comprehension facilitates the retrieval process. Consequently, more informative linguistic expressions are predicted to enhance memory retrieval.; A series of self-paced reading tasks show these predictions to be true in a variety of filler-gap constructions with a variety of phrase-types in English, e.g. argument wh-phrases, temporal adjunct phrases, indefinites, and definites. In all these experiments, reading times are faster when the memory representation associated with a more informative filler-phrase is targeted. Crucially, these "informativity effects" consistently appear at likely retrieval sites. Moreover, in nearly all of the experiments, there is no effect of informativity in the word regions prior to the retrieval site. This fact argues in favor of treating the informativity effects as intrinsically linked to memory retrieval.; The underlying relationship between informativity and retrieval is also explored in depth within this dissertation. That is, I address the question of why greater syntactic and semantic complexity facilitates retrieval. There are multiple, plausible reasons for why informativity attenuates retrievability, including encoding time differences and differences in plausibility. In the end, I conclude that this relationship reflects what happens cognitively during the encoding process and the retrieval process. Specifically, the process of building a more complex syntactic representation requires repeatedly accessing that representation to modify it. This effectively amounts to increasing the activation associated with the corresponding mental representation. The resulting representational complexity also presents multiple retrieval paths to offset the difficulty of retrieving any single item in memory. Furthermore, semantic enrichment of a representation causes a memory item to become more unique in memory, thereby limiting the effect of interference from other items in memory.; The activation of discourse representations, according to this research, fluctuates throughout discourse as a function of constraints on working memory, as well as the history of accessing those representations and the quantity of information used to guide those retrievals. Representation complexity partially offsets the hindrances to sentence processing posed by decay and interference, because the process of building the complex representation creates a highly activated memory network and because the ensuing cognitive structure allows for multiple retrieval strategies.; The implications of this research extend to theories of discourse and reference, but also to theories of syntax. Controlled acceptability studies demonstrate a sensitivity to manipulations of informativity in a way that parallels the results of the reading time studies. Hence, variation in acceptability judgments can be modeled on the basis of processing-based differences. This type of explanation provides an economical way of accounting for variation in grammaticality judgments without introducing any new machinery. Combined with prior theories of reference and models of discourse, the research in this dissertation thus provides a more comprehensive view of discourse and shows for the first time how linguistic form can both reflect and attenuate retrievability. By presenting a theory of the consequences of informational complexity for s... |
