Sentences like (1a) could be interpreted in a largely incremental fashion. The attachment of the gap in subject position of the RC to “reporter” happens immediately as the verb “attacked” is parsed. However, according to the WM capacity account, comprehenders have to hold “reporter” in sentence (1b) across some new discourse referents (e.g., the object referent “senator”) before attaching it to “attacked” as an object. Thus, the activation of “reporter” decays more in the ORC structure due to more discourse referents being processed and fewer resources being available for maintaining syntactic representations, as there is assumed to be a trade-off between processing and maintenance in most capacity models.