Grodner, D., & Gibson, E. (2005). Consequences of the serial nature of linguistic input for sentenial complexity. Cognitive Science, 29(2), 261-290.

Grodner, D.; Gibson, E.

2005

Grodner, D., & Gibson, E. (2005). Consequences of the serial nature of linguistic input for sentenial complexity. Cognitive Science, 29(2), 261-290.

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All other things being equal the parser favors attaching an ambiguous modifier to the most recent possible site. A plausible explanation is that locality preferences such as this arise in the service of minimizing memory costs-more distant sentential material is more difficult to reactivate than more recent material. Note that processing any sentence requires linking each new lexical item with material in the current parse. This often involves the construction of long-distance dependencies. Under a resource-limited view of language processing, lengthy integrations should induce difficulty even in unambiguous sentences. To date there has been little direct quantitative evidence in support of this perspective. This article presents 2 self-paced reading studies, which explore the hypothesis that dependency distance is a fundamental determinant of reading complexity in unambiguous constructions in English. The evidence suggests that the difficulty associated with integrating a new input item is heavily determined by the amount of lexical material intervening between the input item and the site of its target dependents. The patterns observed here are not straightforwardly accounted for within purely experience-based models of complexity. Instead, this work supports the role of a memory bottleneck in language comprehension. This constraint arises because hierarchical linguistic relations must be recovered from a linear input stream.

The data indicate that the processig load for object-extracted RCs diverges most from subject-extracted RCs at the embedded verb. This supports the thesis that locality effects derive from resource constraints imposed on perceptual processes rather than emerging as by-products of structural frequency matching. At this point in the clause, multiple nonlocal structural integrations must be performed. Thus locality can explain the differential difficulty between the two types of RCs. There was no special difficulty observed over the embedded subject of the object-extracted RC. This disconfirms the predictions of both the experience based account and the AFS.

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