In search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension.

Abstract

Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such locality effects are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties and limitations of the short-term memory system that supports comprehension. Despite their theoretical importance and putative ubiquity, however, evidence for on-line locality effects is quite narrow linguistically and methodologically: It is restricted almost exclusively to self-paced reading of complex structures involving a particular class of syntactic relation. We present 4 experiments (2 self-paced reading and 2 eyetracking experiments) that demonstrate locality effects in the course of establishing subject-verb dependencies; locality effects are seen even in materials that can be read quickly and easily. These locality effects are observable in the earliest possible eye-movement measures and are of much shorter duration than previously reported effects. To account for the observed empirical patterns, we outline a processing model of the adaptive control of button pressing and eye movements. This model makes progress toward the goal of eliminating linking assumptions between memory constructs and empirical measures in favor of explicit theories of the coordinated control of motor responses and parsing.

The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing

“…For example, Grodner and Gibson (2005) and Bartek, Lewis, Vasishth, and Smith (2011) present evidence that in English argument-verb dependencies, increasing the distance between the verb and the argument leads to slower reading times. A similar pattern is observed in argument-verb dependencies in Russian RCs , and this has been replicated in Hungarian (Kovács & Vasishth, 2013).…”

The structure-sensitivity of memory access: evidence from Mandarin Chinese

“…To preview our conclusion, the results of our investigation support the main predictions of the Local Search hypothesis. We argue that the Local Search hypothesis offers important insight into a widely-observed preference for local dependencies over distant dependencies in sentence comprehension (Kimball, 1973; Hawkins, 1994; Gibson, 1998; Bartek et al, 2011; a . o .).…”

“…It is widely observed that local syntactic dependencies are easier to process or, in cases of ambiguity, preferred over longer syntactic dependencies (Kimball, 1973; Frazier, 1978; Just and Carpenter, 1992; Hawkins, 1994; Gibson, 1998; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005; Lewis et al, 2006; Bartek et al, 2011; inter alia ). Because cue-based, direct access mechanisms do not need to execute a serial search of a parse to retrieve a syntactic dependent or a pronominal antecedent, locality effects cannot emerge as a property of the access mechanism without making further assumptions.…”

Processing effects in linguistic judgment data: (super-)additivity and reading span scores

“…In Experiment 1, this trend emerged starkly in the most difficult conditions, according to independent reading time evidence (Bartek et al 2011). In the easier conditions, where there was no embedding of the subject NP, there was essentially no variation ascribable due to individual differences on the reading span task (see Figure 2).…”