A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture. To demonstrate this, this article investigates an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirms a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: Partialcue matches-which constitute a kind of similarity-based interference-can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.
Three experiments (self-paced reading, eyetracking and an ERP study) show that in
relative clauses, increasing the distance between the relativized noun and the
relative-clause verb makes it more difficult to process the relative-clause verb (the
so-called locality effect). This result is consistent with the predictions of several
theories (Gibson, 2000; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005), and contradicts the recent claim
(Levy, 2008) that in relative-clause structures increasing argument-verb distance makes
processing easier at the verb. Levy’s expectation-based account predicts that the
expectation for a verb becomes sharper as distance is increased and therefore processing
becomes easier at the verb. We argue that, in addition to expectation effects (which are
seen in the eyetracking study in first-pass regression probability), processing load
also increases with increasing distance. This contradicts Levy’s claim that heightened
expectation leads to lower processing cost. Dependency- resolution cost and
expectation-based facilitation are jointly responsible for determining processing
cost.
Previous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have presented evidence suggesting that coercion expressions (e.g., began the book) are more difficult to process than control expressions like read the book. While this processing cost has been attributed to a specific coercion operation for recovering an event-sense of the complement (e.g., began reading the book), an alternative view based on the Surprisal Theory of language processing would attribute the cost to the relative unpredictability of the complement noun in the coercion compared to the control condition, with no need to postulate coercion-specific mechanisms. In two experiments, monitoring eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs), respectively, we sought to determine whether there is any evidence for coercion-specific processing cost above-and-beyond the difficulty predicted by surprisal, by contrasting coercing and control expressions with a further control condition in which the predictability of the complement noun was similar to that in the coercion condition (e.g., bought the book). While the eye-tracking study showed significant effects of surprisal and a marginal effect of coercion on late reading measures, the ERP study clearly supported the surprisal account. Overall, our findings suggest that the coercion cost largely reflects the surprisal of the complement noun with coercion specific operations possibly influencing later processing stages.
We tested the effects of two intonation contours on the processing and cued recall of German sentences with a leftdislocated subject vs. object: (i) a rising accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a rising-falling hat contour on the main clause; (ii) a falling accent on the dislocated phrase, followed by a falling accent plus subsequent deaccentuation. The contours had differential effects depending on the grammatical function of the dislocated phrase (subject/object) and, for the recall, on the cue type for the recall (subject/object), in certain conditions overriding the subject-before-object preference normally found in processing. To account for the findings, we propose: (1) Contour (i) signals the topic status of the referent of the dislocated phrase. Contour (ii) signals that referent's focus status.(2) Topics are referents that serve as an address in a structured discourse representation in working memory under which information about that referent is stored.(3) Subjects are default topics, whereas objects are not, so that topic-marking an object is motivated, which results in an object-before-subject preference for sentences with topical objects during processing. (4) Retrieval of information from an address incurs a lower processing load if the appropriate address is cued than if some other referent is cued.
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