Stephanie Rich / Exploring similarity-based interference on the basis of context during encoding
Stephanie Rich / Exploring similarity-based interference on the basis of context during encoding
Friday October 17, the Linguistics Colloquium welcomes Stephanie Rich, from the Psycholinguistics and Cognition Lab at Concordia University, who will share her work on prediction in sentence processing, with a talk titled "Exploring similarity-based interference on the basis of context during encoding."
Similarity between words has been shown to influence incremental sentence processing as a potential source of interference, interfering during the process of encoding or during the process of retrieval. There are many different dimensions of similarity which can be relevant for these processes: in this talk, I explore the idea of similarity on the basis of a shared encoding context, drawing from theories which suggest that an item is encoded in memory not just with information about the item itself but also its surrounding context. I will explore what constitutes an encoding context in sentential contexts and what processes of interference may occur when two words are encoded in close proximity. I present three sets of studies: one exploring semantic similarity and the effects of temporal contiguity between words, one exploring the role of linguistic boundaries in creating encoding contexts in memory, and one exploring how instances of simultaneous activation may influence perceptions of similarity. Ultimately the talk suggests that proximity during encoding should be considered as a potential source for similarity-based interference.