Similarity-Based Interference in the Processing of Classifier-Noun Dependencies in Mandarin Chinese

During the processing of linguistic dependencies, the presence of a non-dependent word—referred to as a distractor—can sometimes complicate the identification of the correct subject. This phenomenon, known as similarity-based interference, provides a valuable testing ground for competing theories of sentence processing and has garnered significant interest in the field of psycholinguistics. One prominent theory, cue-based retrieval, suggests that the parser initiates a search for the relevant linguistic dependent at the retrieval site (e.g., the verb) based on a set of retrieval cues. In this work, we explore the use of lexicon-specific cues set by classifiers in the retrieval of noun dependents in Mandarin Chinese to provide evidence for the cue-based retrieval mechanism. A further open question is whether the distractor must intervene between the co-dependents (so-called retroactive interference) or whether the distractor can appear to the left of the dependent elements (so-called proactive interference). Previous work has suggested that proactive interference is weaker than retroactive interference, i.e., that the distractor has to intervene between the co-dependents to influence the dependency completion process. Using self-paced reading and A-Maze tasks, and Bayes Factors for hypothesis testing, we found robust evidence for a predicted interference effect in retroactive configurations, but no interference in proactive configurations. We discuss the theoretical implications of the current work for theories of retrieval and sentence processing in general.