PARALLEL QUESTION PARSING AND MEMORY RETRIEVAL

Two experiments were conducted to examine the relationship between question parsing and memory retrieval. Subjects read and answered questions about brief paragraphs. Questions varied in terms of the location of the question component relative to the presupposition. In the first experiment a single question word (True, Why, or When) was read either before or after the main concept being queried. Reading times for words in the presupposition were longer when the question word came first, but time to begin the answer was much faster. The results were replicated in a second experiment using more natural sentence constructions. The data support the hypothesis that question parsing and answer retrieval are not strictly serial processes. Several mechanisms that incorporate parallelism are discussed. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.