ABSTRACT
In cognitive psychology, certain difficulties of comprehending and remembering are explained in terms of interference between elements (such as words) that have been copied and located in a working memory. The title of this chapter
comes from an article by R.Lewis (1996) based on this idea.1 Lewis’ paper presents a variety of sentences that people have difficulty comprehending. Using these examples, R.Lewis developed a model of natural language comprehension (NL-Soar) that explains the comprehension in terms of interference effects. Apparently, the inability to coordinate multiple noun phrases (more than two or three) is caused by an inability to hold fixed a greater number of references while other parts of the sentences are being processed and related.
