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Direct Evidence of Memory Retrieval as a Source of Difficulty
- in Non-Local Dependencies in Language. Cognitive Science
, 2013
"... Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memor ..."
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Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered. According to these memory-based accounts, making the first dependent accessible at the time when the second dependent is encoun-tered should help alleviate the difficulty associated with the processing of non-local dependencies. In a dual-task paradigm, participants read sentences that did or did not contain a non-local depen-dency (i.e., object- and subject-extracted cleft constructions) while simultaneously remembering a word. The memory task was aimed at making the word held in memory accessible throughout the sentence. In an object-extracted cleft (e.g., It was Ellen whom John consulted…), the object (Ellen) must be retrieved from memory when consulted is encountered. In the critical manipulation, the memory word was identical to the verb’s object (ELLEN). In these conditions, the extraction effect was reduced in the comprehension accuracy data and eliminated in the reading time data. These results add to the body of evidence supporting memory-based accounts of syntactic complexity.
Crossings as a side effect of dependency lengths
"... The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: de-pendencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. Here we investigate two competing hypotheses for the origins of non-crossing de-pendencies. The traditional hypothesis is that the low frequency of de-pendency crossing ..."
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The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: de-pendencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. Here we investigate two competing hypotheses for the origins of non-crossing de-pendencies. The traditional hypothesis is that the low frequency of de-pendency crossings arises from an independent principle of syntax that reduces crossings practically to zero. An alternative to this view is the hypothesis that crossings are a side effect of dependency lengths. Accord-ing to this view, sentences with shorter dependency lengths should tend to have fewer crossings. We recast the traditional view as a null hypothesis where one of the variables, i.e. the number of crossings, is mean indepen-dent of the other, i.e. the sum of dependency lengths. The alternative view is then a positive correlation between these two variables. In spite of the rough estimation of dependency crossings that this sum provides, we are able to reject the traditional view in the majority of languages considered. The alternative hypothesis can lead to a more parsimonious theory of syntax. 1
unknown title
, 2012
"... Direct evidence of memory retrieval as a source of difficulty in non-local dependencies in language ..."
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Direct evidence of memory retrieval as a source of difficulty in non-local dependencies in language
Review Feature Review Networks in Cognitive Science
"... Networks of interconnected nodes have long played a ..."
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
, 2012
"... Sentence comprehension Memory limitations in language comprehension Parsing a b s t r a c t time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly ..."
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Sentence comprehension Memory limitations in language comprehension Parsing a b s t r a c t time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly
Expectation and Locality Effects in German Verb-final Structures
"... Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both locality ..."
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Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both locality effects, in which more dependents preceding a governing verb increase processing difficulty at the verb, and anti-locality effects, in which more preceding dependents facilitate processing at the verb. However, no controlled study has previously demonstrated both locality and anti-locality ef-fects in the same type of dependency relation within the same language. Additionally, many previous demonstrations of anti-locality effects have been potentially confounded with lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. Here, we provide new evidence of both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation in a single language—verb-final constructions in German—while controlling for lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence posi-tion. In main clauses, we find clear anti-locality effects, with the presence of a preceding dative argument facilitating processing at the final verb; in subject-extracted relative clauses with identical linear ordering of verbal dependents, we find both anti-locality and locality effects, with processing facilitated when the verb is preceded by a dative argu-ment alone, but hindered when the verb is preceded by both the dative argument and an adjunct. These results indicate that both expectations and memory limitations need to be accounted for in any complete theory of online syntactic comprehension.
