Incorporating Re-retrieval into the ACT–R-based Cue Retrieval Model

Abstract This paper presents a revision of a recently proposed ACT–R-based cue retrieval model. Memory retrieval—the process of accessing information stored in memory—is often considered crucial to real-time sentence processing. For example, upon encountering “ himself ” in the sentence “ John introduced himself ”, interpreting the reflexive requires the retrieval of its antecedent, “ John ”, from memory. ACT–R-based cue retrieval models assume that morphosyntactic features, such as the masculine feature of “ himself ”, and information about sentence structure serve as cues for memory retrieval. A recent revision of the traditional ACT–R-based cue retrieval model incorporates the influence of prominent elements (i.e., elements that stand out in the context) and successfully predicts unexpected interference effects observed in some previous studies. However, the revised model fails to predict a target mismatch effect when a distractor, the source of interference, is substantially more prominent than the target. A target mismatch effect arises when the retrieval trigger (“ himself ”) and the target (“ the girl ”) mismatch in a morphosyntactic feature, as in “* The girl introduced himself ”. The model proposed here addresses this limitation by incorporating a re-retrieval mechanism into the ACT–R-based cue retrieval model. Simulation results show that the proposed model successfully predicts target mismatch effects while retaining the previous model’s ability to account for the influence of prominent elements.