Response to E.3 does not really address the editor's demand

[vasishth]

More text needs to be written to bring out the connection between memory research and sentence processing (more text needed in the paper).

[vasishth]

I would have written in the paper:

It is well-established in sentence processing that completing linguistic dependencies requires memory retrieval (lewis06). In fact, a key assumption in psycholinguistics is that the same constraints on memory retrieval that have been identified within memory research in cognitive psychology (e.g., the Anderson book 2004) may be applicable in sentence processing as well. An example of a key construct from cognitive psychology that is relevant for sentence processing is spreading activation leading to difficulty in identifying the correct dependent. The present work investigates whether and how such independently posited, general constraints on memory retrieval impact sentence processing.

As a concrete example of general memory constraints impacting sentence comprehension, consider (1). (1) The worker was surprised that the resident who was living near the dan- gerous warehouse was complaining about the investigation. (vandyke07) There is clear evidence in the psycholinguistic literature (jaeger ̇etal ̇2020; nicenboim; vandyke ̇mcelree06; vandyke ̇lewis03) that, at the verb was complaining, it is necessary to re- trieve the subject the resident from memory in order to interpret who did what to whom. A widely-held assumption is that such memory retrievals during sentence comprehension are guided by retrieval cues (Lewis2005; mcelree).

[PSchoknecht]

Very good.

a key construct from cognitive psychology that is relevant for sentence processing is spreading activation leading to difficulty in identifying the correct dependent. The present work investigates whether and how such independently posited, general constraints on memory retrieval impact sentence processing.

I would like to rewrite this as:

a key construct from cognitive psychology that is relevant for sentence processing is that spreading activation leads to difficulty in identifying the correct item to retrieve from memory. The present work investigates whether and how such independently posited, general constraints on memory retrieval impact sentence processing.

[vasishth]

yes this is better than my version. i hate gerundives, i don't know why i wrote one.

[PSchoknecht]

memory research in cognitive psychology (e.g., the Anderson book 2004)

Did you mean:

Anderson, J. R., Bothell, D., Byrne, M. D., Douglass, S., Lebiere, C., & Qin, Y. (2004). An integrated theory of the mind. Psychological Review, 111 (4), 1036–1060. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.111.4.1036 ?

[vasishth]

yes

[PSchoknecht]

Revised response:

"Our work is situated in the cue-based retrieval framework which has been built over the last decades (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, 2000) and is informed by memory research (see e.g., Anderson et al., 2004). The key assumption is that sentence processing relies on skilled memory processes, with a focus on memory retrieval. We built on this assumption and focus on the question which specific retrieval cues are being used during subject-verb dependency resolution. Our data suggest that the retrieval cues generated at the verb are highly specific (including hierarchical syntactic information) and can successfully identify the subject as the retrieval target. Therefore, the present findings further support the assumption that sentence processing relies on skilled memory retrieval. We have revised the introduction to emphasized the theoretical grounding of our work (see page 3)"