PhD defence Jan Winkowski: How our minds juggle memory and language

On Wednesday 17 June, Jan Winkowski will defend their dissertation ‘Memory retrieval in presupposition processing: An experimental and computational approach’. In this thesis, Winkowski explores the hidden memory work behind everyday language comprehension.

Reading and remembering 

Language comprehension relies on memory, Winkowski writes. In many cases, we need information scattered throughout a text to understand what it means. Take the sentence ‘Mary, who was really tired, passes the bag to Suzy’. To understand who is doing the passing, our mind needs to reach back and retrieve ‘Mary’ from memory. 

Something similar happens with words like ‘too’. Consider: ‘Suzy lives in Paris. Kelsey lives in France, too.’ The word ‘too’ asks the reader to look back: who else was mentioned and where did they live? This means that we have to retrieve from our memory a slightly different type of information than in the case of ‘Mary’.

Behavioural experiments and computational modelling

In their dissertation, Winkowski investigates exactly this type of relations. What happens when the two connected words are far apart in a sentence? Through behavioural experiments, they found that the greater the distance, the more effort is needed to make the connection. 

To explain this, Winkowski built computational models. The models explored a variety of possible explanations and ultimately pointed to a combination of causes: parallel processing and diminishing activation. During reading the reader must process multiple things at the same time and the memory of an earlier word fades as time passes.

Winkowski’s research contributes to our understanding of how memory and language comprehension work and highlights the difficulties and pitfalls of capturing cognition in computational models.

Prior to the defence, Winkowski will give a layman’s talk starting at 10:00.