Feature encoding modulates cue-based retrieval: Modeling interference effects in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences
Studies on similarity-based interference in subject-verb agreement dependencies have found a consistent facilitatory effect in ungrammatical sentences but no conclusive effect in grammatical sentences. Existing models propose that interference is caused either by a faulty representation of the input (encoding-based models) or by difficulty in retrieving the subject based on cues at the verb (retrieval-based models). Neither class of model captures the observed patterns in human reading time data. We propose a new model that integrates a feature encoding mechanism into an existing cue-based retrieval model. Our model outperforms the cue-based retrieval model in explaining interference effect data from both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. We argue that our integrated encoding and retrieval model can provide a basis for experimental and modeling work on understanding interference effects in sentence comprehension.