AUTHOR=Laurinavichyute Anna , Jäger Lena A. , Akinina Yulia , Roß Jennifer , Dragoy Olga 

TITLE=Retrieval and Encoding Interference: Cross-Linguistic Evidence from Anaphor Processing

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2017

YEAR=2017

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00965

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00965

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=The main goal of this paper was to disentangle encoding and retrieval
interference effects in anaphor processing and thus to evaluate the hy-
pothesis predicting that structurally inaccessible nouns (distractors) are
not considered to be potential anaphor antecedents during language pro-
cessing (Nicol & Swinney, 1989). Three self-paced reading experiments
were conducted: one in German, comparing gender-unmarked reflexives
and gender-marked pronouns, and two in Russian, comparing gender-
marked and gender-unmarked reflexives. In the German experiment, no
interference effects were found. In the first experiment in Russian, an
unexpected reading times pattern emerged: in the condition where the
distractor matched the gender of the reflexive’s antecedent, reading of the
gender-unmarked, but not the gender-marked reflexives was slowed down.
The same reading times pattern was replicated in a second experiment in
Russian where the order of the reflexive and the main verb was inverted.
We conclude that the results of the two experiments in Russian are in-
consistent with the retrieval interference account, but can be explained
by encoding interference and additional semantic processing efforts asso-
ciated with the processing of gender-marked reflexives. In sum, we found
no evidence that would allow us to reject the syntax as an early filer ac-
count (Nicol & Swinney, 1989)