Proximity and Same Case Marking Do Not Increase Attraction Effect in Comprehension: Evidence From Eye-Tracking Experiments in Korean

Previous studies have suggested that during the on-line sentence processing, relevant memory representations are directly accessed based on cues at retrieval (McElree et al., 2003). Under this hypothesis, retrieval cues activate any memory representation with matching features, leading to the so-called attraction effect. This predicts that attraction effects would be modulated by memory representation of a distractor. Here, we investigated this possibility, focusing on two factors (i.e., proximity to the retrieval point and the number of matching features) that would affect representation of a distractor in three Korean eye-tracking experiments. We predicted that if memory representation of a distractor decays over time, a distractor close to a retrieval point would lead to stronger attraction effects. We also predicted that a distractor would be more likely to lead to interference when it shares a higher number of matching features with the retrieval cues of a dependency, relative to the target of the dependency, due to multiple direct accesses based on multiple matching cues. However, the results did not show evidence that proximity of a distractor to the retrieval point enhanced attraction effects. Likewise, there was no evidence that a greater number of matching cues of a distractor alone would trigger more mis-retrieval, in contrast to a previous finding that a greater number of mismatching cues of a licit antecedent in addition to a greater number of matching cues of a distractor did so (Parker and Phillips, 2017). On the other hand, the results suggested that a distractor marked with nominative case was more likely to be mis-retrieved as the subject of a verb, compared to a distractor marked with a dative case, suggesting that the subject grammatical role is a critical cue for a subject-verb agreement. These results are best compatible with the hypothesis that retrieval cues are weighted, possibly depending on the nature of the dependency that is currently processed.