Bridging Mechanisms of Reading, Viewing and Working Memory during Attachment Resolution of Ambiguous Relative Clauses

Cognitive mechanisms sustaining reading, viewing and working memory are mostly independently examined. In this study, we investigate their interaction in a visual-world priming task. Participants first read relative clauses (RC) morphologically disambiguated for high-(to NP1, HA) or low-attachment (to NP2, LA) (e.g., The helper|helpers of the bakers|baker who will [sg] deliver the bread has|have arrived), and then heard a spoken temporarily ambiguous RC (e.g., the father of the baby who will drink the beer|baby bottle is tall) while presented with a visual context (i.e., VWP). Using linear-mixed effects models, we predict anticipatory fixations to the visual referents associated with NP1 and NP2 as a function of: (i) second-pass time observed during their reading and (ii) individual working memory scores. We demonstrate that high-capacity individuals anticipate more the (non-primed) visual referent when they reread more its associated NP (e.g., anticipate the visual referent ‘father’ when reread more often NP1, the helpers). We suggest that working memory capacity allows individuals to maintain alternative syntactic analyses of the sentence, and evaluate them upon a subsequent visual context. These findings provide support to the constraint-capacity theory, and shed new light on the cross-modal mechanisms underlying syntactic ambiguity resolution.