摘要：Recent evidence suggests that the memory system supporting linguistic representations in the short term has properties contrasting sharply with traditional views of verbal STM (McElree, 2003; Lewis et al 2006). One such architectural property is that there is an actively maintained focus of only one or two items. How can such a limited system process language? The cue-based retrieval theory provides one answer: incremental sentence processing is realized by a series of rapid memory retrievals. What limits performance is the effectiveness of retrieval cues in discriminating among noisy candidate memory representations—a principle shared by nearly all contemporary theories of memory in mathematical/computational psychology.
