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.
A linear model of distance-based integration costs makes excellent quantitative predictions of reading times by words and regions across the sort of subject modifications examined in this experiment. This was true even when item-specific variance was included in analyses. By inserting additional material within subject postmodifiers, reading time difficulty at the verbs increased. These results do not support the notion that complexity is driven by structural rarity or level of embedding. If it was, difficulty should have been most prominent at the onsets of modifying phrases. The majority of variation in reading times here was observed over regions containing verbs.
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