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.
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