Psycho-Neuro Meeting - Sebastián Mancha / Temporal grouping effects in sentence recall
Psycho-Neuro Meeting - Sebastián Mancha / Temporal grouping effects in sentence recall
Wednesday 11/19 at the Psycho-Neuro Meeting Sebastián discusses plans for a new set of experiments on temporal grouping effects in sentence recall and what they might reveal about the format of memory for syntax, described below.
Previous work examining the immediate serial recall of unstructured word lists (DOG BRICK DOOR TRUCK PLANT PEN) has discovered the existence of "temporal grouping" effects, whereby comprehenders build hierarchically grouped representations of lists ([DOG BRICK DOOR] [TRUCK PLANT PEN], Farrell 2012, Hurlstone et al. 2014, Hurlstone 2024). Work on the Sentence Superiority Effect (the finding that sentences are memorized far better than random word lists of the same length) for multiclausal sentences has uncovered similar patterns (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler 1976, Roverud et al. 2020). In the domain of sentences, it seems that comprehenders divide sentences by their clause boundaries, [Bob sold two old hats] [and Sue saw six red toys]. I wish to extend this previous work with an eye towards (psycho)linguistically more complicated stimuli, exploring the natural data structures used to encode syntactic structures in memory. To that end I'll propose and request feedback on two experiments: one involving a lexical category manipulation which will help to deconfound previous results from explanations that make no reference to clausal boundaries, and a second testing more complex(/interesting) sentential structures.