Conceptual similarity effects on working memory in sentence contexts: Testing a theory of anaphora

Abstract

The degree of semantic similarity between an anaphoric noun phrase (e.g., the bird) and its antecedent (e.g., a robin) is known to affect the anaphor resolution process, but the mechanisms that underlie this effect are not known. One proposal (Almor, 1999) is that semantic similarity triggers interference effects in working memory and makes two crucial assumptions: First, semantic similarity impairs working memory just as phonological similarity does (e.g., Baddeley, 1992), and, second, this impairment interferes with processes of sentence comprehension. We tested these assumptions in two experiments that compared recall accuracy between phonologically similar, semantically similar, and control words in sentence contexts. Our results do not provide support for Almor's claims: Phonological overlap decreased recall accuracy in sentence contexts, but semantic similarity did not. These results shed doubt on the idea that semantic interference in working memory is an underlying mechanism in anaphor resolution.

Keywords:

• Anaphora
• Sentence recall
• Semantic similarity

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant R000239362 “Local Focus and NP Interpretation: Testing the Informational Load Hypothesis” to the second author and by start-up funds from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida to the first author. The authors would like to thank Nicholas Williams and Allison Kaufman for their help with Experiment 3 and Jean Saint-Aubin and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper.

Notes

¹ We also conducted an experiment using the same target words and conditions in a word-list recall task that used a nearly identical procedure to that in Experiment 1 and found a similar pattern of results in which phonological overlap caused a decrease in recall accuracy in both overall and order-specific measures (ps < .001), but semantic overlap caused an increase in overall accuracy (ps < .05) and had no effect on order of recall (ts < 1.3). These results are in keeping with other list-recall results using category members (e.g., Saint-Aubin & Poirier, 1999) and as such are not reported in more detail here.