Recency preference in the human sentence processing mechanism

Gibson, Edward; Pearlmutter, Neal J.; Canseco-Gonzalez, Enriqueta; Hickok, Gregory

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(95)00687-7

Cited by 223 publications

(223 citation statements)

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“…Contrary to Mitchell and Cuetos' (1991) claim, however, is evidence presented by Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, and Hickok (1996) that late closure (or a similar recency property) does apply in Spanish RC attachments. They measured reading times using an online grammaticality judgment task with items like those in Example 4, in both Spanish and English.…”

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confidence: 75%

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confidence: 92%

“…This difference resulted in a change in the cross-linguistic pattern: Gibson, Pearlmutter, et al (1996) found that both Spanish and English readers preferred attachment of the RC to the lowest site (casa; house), followed by attachment to the highest site (lampara; lamp), with middle attachments (to pintura; painting) being the most difficult. Thus when only two attachment sites for the RC were present, in Cuetos and Mitchell (1988), Spanish and English differed, but when a third site was also present, comprehenders in the two languages showed the same pattern, preferring to attach to the most local site.…”

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Recency and lexical preferences in Spanish

1999

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One experiment provided evidence in support of Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, and Hickok's (1996) claim that a recency preference applies to Spanish relative clause attachments, contrary to the claim made by Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). Spanish speakers read stimuli involving either two or three potential attachment sites in which the same lexical content of the two-site conditions appeared in a different structural configuration in the three-site conditions. High attachment was easier than low attachment when only two sites were present, but low attachment was preferred over high attachment, which was in turn preferred over middle attachment, when three sites were present. The experiment replicated earlier results and showed that (1) attachment preferences are determined in part by a preference to attach recently/low, and (2) lexical biases are insufficient to explain attachment preferences.Recent debate about the properties of the human sentence processor has focused both on the purported universality, or cross-linguistic applicability, ofvarious parsing principles (e.g., Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988; Frazier, 1987a Frazier, , 1987bMitchell & Cuetos, 1991;Schriefers, Friederici, & Kuhn, 1995) and on the degree to which such principles might be replaced by lexically and contextually determined preferences (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995; MacDonald, Pearl mutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994). Although some of the proposals that are intended to account for evidence about lexical and contextual effects also have implications for universality issues (e.g., Tabor, Juliano, & Tanenhaus, 1997; cf. Frazier, 1995), the majority of the work examining one issue has not directly examined the other (cf. Schriefers et al., 1995).The experiments reported in this paper were conducted while V'I. was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research was supported by NIH Fellowship MHI0592 to N.1.P. We greatly appreciate the comments and advice of Chuck Clifton, Don Mitchell, Michael Spivey-Knowlton, and one anonymous reviewer. We also thank Karlos Arregui-Urbina for helping us to conduct the norming survey; and Nereida Diaz, Patricia Pimentel, and San Tunstall for aid in running participants and in analyzing data. Portions ofthis work were presented at the 1996 meeting ofthe Psychonomic Society (Chicago) and at the 1997 CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (Santa Monica, CA). Correspondence should be addressed to E. Gibson, NE20-459, Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, Cambridge, MA 02 I39 (e-mail: gibson@psyche. mit.edu) or to N. 1. Pearlmutter, Psychology Department 125 NI, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 021 15 (pearimutter@neu.edu).One proposed universal parsing principle that has received recent attention with respect to the universality issue is Frazier's (1978Frazier's ( , 1987a late closure principle (see also Kimball's, 1973, right association and Gibson's, 1991, ...

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Recency and lexical preferences in Spanish

1999

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“…4 Gibson et al (1996) consider a recency/primacy account of the three-NP-site attachment data but do not follow it up for two reasons. First, there are cross-linguistic differences in attachment preferences in two-NP-site attachment preferences (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory Limitations and Structural Forgetting: The Perception of Complex Ungrammatical Sentences as Grammatical

Gibson¹,

Thomas²

1999

Language and Cognitive Processes

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Results from an English acceptability-rating experiment are presented which demonstrate that people nd doubly nested relative clause structures just as acceptable when only two verb phrases are included instead of the grammatically required three. Furthermore, the experiment shows that such sentences are acceptable only when the intermediate verb phrase is omitted. A number of speci c accounts of forgetting are considered. Two early proposed theories of this effect, the disappearing syntactic nodes hypothesis (Frazier, 1985) and the least recent nodes hypothesis (Gibson, 1991), are not consistent with the experimental results. The results, together with other acceptability patterns, suggest that the representations that are retained (and subsequently forgotten) in processing sentences consist of the lexical wordstrings processed thus far. Three possible accounts of the results are considered: (1) the high memory cost pruning hypothesis within the framework of Gibson (1998); (2) a recency/primacy account; and (3) a connectionist account (Christiansen & Chater, in press).

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“…Some of the proposed accounts, such as the construal theory (Frazier & Clifton, 1996) and the referential account (Hemforth, Konieczny, & Scheepers, 2000;Konieczny & Hemforth, 1996), explain the attachment in terms of detailed grammatical devices. Other proposals assume that the syntactic parser tunes to variations in the language to which it is exposed (e.g., Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, & Hickok, 1996;MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994;Mitchell et al, 1995;see Mitchell & Brysbaert, 1998, for a more thorough review of the different proposals). However, thus far none of the theoretical frameworks has explained the processing of relative clause attachment in terms of referential discourse factors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%