Answer candidates are examined by an output process that derives the final answer. These processes run simultaneously and interact. Three experiments on human question answering are also described which provide evidence that working memory load during question reading is affected by processes related to answer retrieval. Parallel question parsing and memory retrieval. Two experiments were conducted to examine the relationship between question parsing and memory retrieval.
Subjects read and answered questions about brief paragraphs.
Questions varied in terms of the location of the question component relative to the presupposition. Reading times for words in the presupposition were longer when the question word came first, but time to begin the answer was much faster. The results were replicated in a second experiment using more natural sentence constructions. The data support the hypothesis that question parsing and and answer retrieval are not strictly serial processes. Several mechanisms that incorporate parallelism are discussed.