## Video presentation ## Check out our 5-min **video**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVAqOHwE9t4 ---------- ## Q&A and connect with us! ## **Zoom**: We will be available for Q&A over Zoom during poster session B (Friday 12-2pm)! Please use the following link to join our Zoom meeting: https://mit.zoom.us/j/374024894 **Commenting**: Also, please make use of the comments button in the upper right corner of your screen when viewing either the poster or the video. These questions will be visible to the public as will our responses. **Email**: You can also email me (Sherry) and Matt with any questions: sychen@mit.edu, matthew.husband@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk ---------- ## Abstract ## Anaphoric presupposition triggers such as too are thought to establish a dependency between the trigger and its presupposed content. Recent work hypothesizes that establishing presuppositional dependencies relies on memory retrieval, finding the speed of processing insensitive to distance manipulations between the desired antecedent and the trigger too, thus exhibiting the signature of a direct access retrieval process. This predicts that the licensing of too in online processing should be subject to illusory licensing effects from structurally inaccessible antecedents, such as those embedded under the modal might (Ex 1-2). In this study, we pushed potential antecedents outside focal attention with long and short clauses [3], and manipulated the Accessibility and Content Matching of these antecedent. We found that content matching but inaccessible antecedents gave rise to illusory licensing of the presupposition of too. The illusion effects appear to be insensitive to distance manipulations: following findings from previous work that the focus of attention for discourse appears to be one clause [2,3], we show that licensing illusions arise once a single clause intervenes whether the antecedent is distant (Exp 1) or only a short distance away (Exp 2). Our results converge with prior findings that report the processing of the presuppositional dependency of too to show signatures of direct access retrieval: The antecedent content of these anaphoric expressions and the trigger too are both retrieved via direct access by using a content-addressable mechanism. Comprehenders are able to directly access the representation of a presupposed content that has been established in the discourse, without searching through irrelevant intermediate material before finding the desired representation in memory. These findings contribute to a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that the memory representations of discourse dependencies formed during comprehension are content-addressable and retrieved with a direct-access process