Interference Based on Semantic Cues : Investigating Retrieval Interference Effects in Filler - Gap Dependencies

Interference phenomena in filler – gap dependencies have been attributed to similarity
based retrieval interference (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis et al., 2006; McElree,
2000, 2006; McElree et al., 2003; Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003; Van Dyke & McElree,
2011). Two seminal studies provided findings claiming that those interference effects
could be either due to semantically plausible distractor words that are sentence external
(Van Dyke and McElree, 2006) or even sentence internal in which case they also
lead to plausibility illusions for otherwise implausible sentences (Cunnings and Sturt,
2018). Two sets of experiments were run to understand those interference phenomena
better. The findings of this thesis indicate that i. semantic similarity alone cannot
always explain filler – gap dependency parsing, ii. structural information is also important
and iii. semantic attraction is not just a repair mechanism for implausible
sentences.