Dependency Resolution Difficulty Increases with Distance in Persian Separable Complex Predicates: Evidence for Expectation and Memory-Based Accounts

Abstract

Delaying the appearance of a verb in a noun-verb dependency tends to increase processing difficulty at the verb; one explanation for this locality effect is decay and/or interference of the noun in working memory. Surprisal, an expectation-based account, predicts that delaying the appearance of a verb either renders it no more predictable or more predictable, leading respectively to a prediction of no effect of distance or a facilitation. Recently, Husain et al. (2014) suggested that when the exact identity of the upcoming verb is predictable (strong predictability), increasing argument-verb distance leads to facilitation effects, which is consistent with surprisal; but when the exact identity of the upcoming verb is not predictable (weak predictability), locality effects are seen. We investigated Husain et al.'s proposal using Persian complex predicates (CPs), which consist of a non-verbal element—a noun in the current study—and a verb. In CPs, once the noun has been read, the exact identity of the verb is highly predictable (strong predictability); this was confirmed using a sentence completion study. In two self-paced reading (SPR) and two eye-tracking (ET) experiments, we delayed the appearance of the verb by interposing a relative clause (Experiments 1 and 3) or a long PP (Experiments 2 and 4). We also included a simple Noun-Verb predicate configuration with the same distance manipulation; here, the exact identity of the verb was not predictable (weak predictability). Thus, the design crossed Predictability Strength and Distance. We found that, consistent with surprisal, the verb in the strong predictability conditions was read faster than in the weak predictability conditions. Furthermore, greater verb-argument distance led to slower reading times; strong predictability did not neutralize or attenuate the locality effects. As regards the effect of distance on dependency resolution difficulty, these four experiments present evidence in favor of working memory accounts of argument-verb dependency resolution, and against the surprisal-based expectation account of Levy (2008). However, another expectation-based measure, entropy, which was computed using the offline sentence completion data, predicts reading times in Experiment 1 but not in the other experiments. Because participants tend to produce more ungrammatical continuations in the long-distance condition in Experiment 1, we suggest that forgetting due to memory overload leads to greater entropy at the verb.

Computational Models of Retrieval Processes in Sentence Processing

“…Some other important future directions in modeling comprehension impairments in aphasia are the following: (a) Expand the cross-linguistic empirical base of the investigation. Previous work [44] has relied on the available data from English, but large-sample data-sets from other languages are needed: the diversity of grammatical constraints, word orders, and morphosyntactic cues available in different languages are known to lead to different processing strategies even in unimpaired populations [63,64,65,66], and such factors may play a role in aphasia as well [67,68]. (b) Evaluate the relative predictive performance of different (retrieval) theories using data from individuals with aphasia and controls.…”

Word Order Typology Interacts With Linguistic Complexity: A Cross‐Linguistic Corpus Study

“…In particular, it has been claimed that head‐final languages (e.g., German, Hindi, Japanese) allow for longer head‐dependent distance. Previous work on predictive processing (Husain et al, 2014; Konieczny, 2000; Levy & Keller, 2013; Miyamoto & Nakamura, 2003; Nakatani & Gibson, 2010; Vasishth & Lewis, 2006) as well as the forgetting effect (Frank & Ernst, 2019; Frank et al, 2016; Husain & Bhatia, 2018; Vasishth et al, 2010) shows that head‐final languages allow for longer distance in dependencies involving verbal heads (but see Safavi, Husain, & Vasishth, 2016; Vasishth & Drenhaus, 2011). For example, with regard to the forgetting effect, it has been shown that contrary to the results in an SVO language like English, in SOV languages like German, Dutch, and Hindi, increased HD (in the form of embedding) does not lead to forgetting of the upcoming verbs.…”

Effects of Early Cues on the Processing of Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for Experience‐Based Theories

“…Such evidence against locality has been used to argue for the expectation‐based account of Levy (), a variant of the experience‐based theories. Recent work has also shown evidence for both locality effects and expectation effects in English (Demberg & Keller, ; Jaeger, Fedorenko, Hofmeister, & Gibson, ; Staub, 2010), German (Levy & Keller, ; Vasishth & Drenhaus, ), Hindi (Husain, Vasishth, & Srinivasan, , ), Persian (Safavi, Husain, & Vasishth, ), and Russian (Levy et al., ).…”