Our results suggest that in some cases, interpreting longer RTs as indexing increased processing difficulty and shorter RTs as facilitation may be too simplistic: The same increase in processing difficulty may lead to slowdowns in high-capacity readers and speedups in low-capacity ones. We present a computational model based on ACT-R built under the previous assumptions, which is able to give a qualitative account for the present data and can be tested in future research. We suggest that while the locality effects are compatible with memory-based explanations, the speedup of low-capacity readers can be explained by an increased probability of retrieval failure.
Contrary to our predictions, low-capacity readers showed faster reading with increased distance, while high-capacity readers showed locality effects. Furthermore, we expected stronger locality effects for readers with low working memory capacity. We predicted only locality effects, that is, a slowdown produced by increased dependency distance ( Gibson, 2000 Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). We examined the effects of argument-head distance in SVO and SOV languages (Spanish and German), while taking into account readers' working memory capacity and controlling for expectation ( Levy, 2008) and other factors. 2Grupo de Lingüística y Neurobiología Experimental del Lenguaje, INCIHUSA, CONICET, Mendoza, Argentina.1Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.Bruno Nicenboim 1 *, Pavel Logačev 1, Carolina Gattei 2 and Shravan Vasishth 1
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