Dynamic binding

[Roger Ratcliff]

We have some experimental data on human subjects that might be 
interesting (challenging) to model for sentence matching for the 
kinds of binding examples given (by Mark).  If subjects study
"John hit Bill" and other active and passive sentences of this
type with different names ("Helen was attracted by Jeff") and then are
given a true/false test (is this sentence true according to those
you studied), then we find evidence for availability of different 
kinds of information as a functin of processing time.  We used a 
response signal procedure in which subjects were interrupted at one
of several times (typically 50, 150, 250, 400, 800, 2000 msec) and
were required to respond immediately, within 200 to 300 ms.  The
probability of responding yes for "John hit Bill" and "Bill hit John"
increased at the same rate from 400 ms to 700 ms of processing time, then 
after 700 ms, information about the relationship (JhB or BhJ) became
available and the two curves split apart.

We concluded that overall match (the three words were the same or something
like that) was available early in processing and later information about
the precise form of the relationship became available.  These data may be
useful when examining the results of matching a sentence against the
representation that is built in the model.

Ratcliff & McKoon, (1989) Similarity information versus relational
information: differences in the time course of retrieval.
Cognitive Psychology, 21, 139-155.

Roger Ratcliff
Psychology dept Northwestern