NSF-BSF: Bridging encoding and retrieval perspectives on sentence processing errors: Comparing Hebrew and English

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To understand language, people need to form links between words that are far apart. For example, the sentence "The dog with the very shiny and healthy black fur doesn’t usually bark" requires the listener or reader to associate the dog with bark, even though those words are quite far apart. To do this, language users need to rely on memory to link words and concepts. However, human memory is famously prone to error: Humans routinely forget, misremember, and conflate aspects of their experience. In the context of language understanding, these memory failures can lead to incorrect interpretations of sentences. This project aims to understand how and why memory can distort reading and language comprehension by looking at how memory errors impact users of two very different languages, English and Hebrew. English and Hebrew differ in how they organize the words within sentences and whether they assign gender to nouns; Hebrew assigns masculine and feminine genders to nouns, similar to languages like Spanish and French but unlike English. The researchers will study how these linguistic differences between Hebrew and English influence when interpretation errors will arise in users of these two languages. In doing so, the researchers will try to uncover characteristics of memory errors that have the same effect on understanding across languages and those that are language-specific. The results of this project will be used to understand how human memory systems support real-time language comprehension.Research on this question suggests that two kinds of processes can disrupt language comprehension when a sentence requires the reader to hold multiple words in memory. One process occurs when the features of more recent words accidentally overwrite parts of earlier words. This type of ‘encoding error’ means that the reader erroneously perceives a word that recombines the features of two different words. For example, in a sentence like “The road to the mountains was blocked,” they may misremember "road" as "roads" by combining the singular “road” with the plural feature of “mountains.” Another type of error can arise when trying to retrieve a particular word from memory. For example, a reader or listener might pick out the wrong word from memory at the critical moment in understanding a sentence, thinking that the mountains were blocked in the sentence above, rather than the road (a ‘retrieval’ error). Language comprehension can in principle be disrupted by either or both of these processes. The investigators will track eye movements of people while they are reading in English and Hebrew and collect speeded acceptability judgments. Together these measures should reflect the relative contribution of encoding and retrieval errors in both languages. The particular pattern of comprehension errors that arises in reading will then be tested against computational models of human working memory in language processing. The combination of these two research methods will help account for how people understand sentences so easily most of the time, and why misinterpretations can and do arise at other times. Understanding how and when interpretation errors arise can also help us better understand various atypical language and reading patterns, such as shown in dyslexia. This project will advance collaboration between American and Israeli language researchers and will involve advanced STEM training for researchers at different career stages, from undergraduates to post-doctoral scholars.This project was co-funded by PAC, Linguistics, and EHR Core Research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.