Maintenance cost in the processing of subject–verb dependencies.

Abstract

Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or phoneme-monitoring tasks. In the current study, we used eye tracking during reading to test whether maintaining a long-distance SV dependency results in a processing cost on an intervening adverbial clause. In Experiment 1, we studied this question in Spanish and found that both go-past reading times and regressions out of an adverbial clause to the previous regions were significantly increased when the clause interrupts a SV dependency compared to when the same clause doesn't interrupt this dependency. We then replicated these findings in English (Experiment 2), observing significantly increased go-past reading times on a clause interrupting a SV dependency. The current study provides the first eye-tracking data showing a maintenance cost in the processing of SV dependencies cross-linguistically. Sentence comprehension models should account for the maintenance cost generated by SV dependency processing, and future research should focus on the nature of the maintained representation.

Robust effects of working memory demand during naturalistic language comprehension in language-selective cortex

“…Thus, whatever storage costs may exist, they appear to be considerably fainter than integration costs (smaller effects, weaker and less consistent improvements to fit), and a higher-powered study may be needed to tease the two types of cost apart convincingly (or to reject the distinction). In this way, our study reflects a fairly mixed literature on storage costs in sentence processing, with some studies reporting effects (King & Kutas, 1995; Fiebach et al, 2002; Chen et al, 2005; Ristic et al, 2021) and others failing to find any (Hakes et al, 1976; Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003).…”

Robust Effects of Working Memory Demand during Naturalistic Language Comprehension in Language-Selective Cortex

“…Thus, whatever storage costs may exist, they appear to be considerably fainter than integration costs (smaller effects, weaker and less consistent improvements to fit), and a higher-powered study may be needed to tease the two types of cost apart convincingly (or to reject the distinction). In this way, our study reflects a fairly mixed literature on storage costs in sentence processing, with some studies reporting effects (King & Kutas, 1995;Fiebach et al, 2002;Chen et al, 2005;Ristic et al, 2021) and others failing to find any (Hakes et al, 1976;Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003). Correlation r of full model predictions with the true response compared to a "ceiling" measure correlating the true response with the mean response of all other participants for a particular story/fROI.…”

Assessing Corpus Evidence for Formal and Psycholinguistic Constraints on Nonprojectivity

“…Given the gap between the point at which prediction is made and the point at which the concerned linguistic entity is received via input, linguistic predictions have to be maintained in memory (Gibson 1998). This maintenance cost has been shown to correspond to measurable processing difficulty (Husain, Vasishth, and Srinivasan 2015;Ristic et al 2021), that is, prediction maintenance over a longer period can be costly. It is therefore expected that longer maintenance of dependencies involved in crossing should be avoided.…”