Is There a Particular RC Attachment Preference in Turkish? Negotiating the Effects of Semantic Factors

Başer, Zeynep; Hohenberger, Annette

doi:10.1007/s10936-020-09698-4

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Among the limitations of our study, we acknowledge that the preference for high attachment in Russian, utilised in our study as a proxy of top-down structural heuristic, may not always be driven by purely structural mechanisms. Alternatively, attachment preferences may be driven by discourse prominence, specific semantic relations, or implicit prosody of the language (Başer & Hohenberger, 2020; Fodor, 2002; Gilboy et al, 1995). But even though these non-structural factors may play a role in the preference for high attachment, we believe that these heuristics still pertains to top-down preferences in structure-building and thus demonstrates a different kind of top-down heuristic processing than what was measured by semantic plausibility heuristics in our study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reliance on semantic and structural heuristics in sentence comprehension across the lifespan

Lopukhina

Laurinavichyute

Malyutina

et al. 2021

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

People sometimes misinterpret the sentences that they read. One possible reason suggested in the literature is a race between slow bottom-up algorithmic processing and “fast and frugal” top-down heuristic processing that serves to support fast-paced communication but sometimes results in incorrect representations. Heuristic processing can be both semantic, relying on world knowledge and semantic relations between words, and structural, relying on structural economy. Scattered experimental evidence suggests that reliance on heuristics may change from greater reliance on syntactic information in younger people to greater reliance on semantic information in older people. We tested whether the reliance on structural and semantic heuristics changes with age in 137 Russian-speaking adolescents, 135 young adults, and 77 older adults. In a self-paced reading task with comprehension questions, participants read unambiguous high- vs. low-attachment sentences that were either semantically plausible or implausible: i.e., the syntactic structure either matched or contradicted the semantic relations between words. We found that the use of top-down heuristics in comprehension increased across the lifespan. Adolescents did not rely on structural heuristics, in contrast to young and older adults. At the same time, older adults relied on semantic heuristics more than young adults and adolescents. Importantly, we found that top-down heuristic processing was faster than bottom-up algorithmic processing: slower reading times were associated with greater accuracy specifically in implausible sentences.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%