Distributed representations and graceful degradation

[Elizabeth Bates]

Marcel Just and Patricia Carpenter have a paper coming out in Psychological
Review that shows (reviewing quite a range of studies) how the ability
of normal adults to handle (read, comprehend) various levels of grammatical
complexity and ambiguity interacts with (1) that adult's working memory
span, and (2) the effects of a cognitive load imposed by a secondary
task.  The notion of graceful degradation seems to apply to their work
very well.  You can obtain a preprint of their paper by contacting them
at CMU (Psychology Department). -liz bates