Levy, R.,
Fedorenko, E., & Gibson, E. (2013). The syntactic complexity of Russian
relative clauses. Journal of Memory and
Language, 69, 461-495.
Human language is unique amongst
communication systems because of its expressivity:
We can hear a sentence we have never heard before and understand its meaning.
But how does this happen? We do not have the memory resources to pursue every
possible interpretation of a sentence, so there must be some sort of cognitive
constraint that guides our understanding. Possible cognitive constraints have
been investigated by examining how long it takes for people to understand or
read sentences that present some confusion, that is, syntactic ambiguity resolution.
Research in processing relative clauses is important in
understanding syntactic ambiguity resolution because these are one of the most
complex sentence forms we encounter, and they offer an avenue to explore
language’s rich expressive capacity. There are two types of relative clauses
examined in this paper:
1)
Subject-extracted
relative clause
The reporter who attacked
the senator hoped for a story
subject relative clause verb object
2)
Object-extracted
relative clause
The reporter who the senator
attacked hoped for a story
object
subject relative clause verb
The finding is that object
relative clause sentences are more difficult to process than subject relative
clause sentences. The authors distinguish between two theories that explain
this difference in processing: Memory
Based Theories and Expectation Based
Theories. Memory Based Theories state that the comprehender is actively
storing, integrating, and retrieving incoming information from the sentence in
an online fashion. In these theories, the more material that needs to be
processed, the more overloaded the memory system gets and the higher the
processing load. Based on this theory, sentence 2 is harder to process because
you need to hold more information in memory before you get to the verb attacked, which is the point where the
meaning of the sentence becomes clear.
Expectation Based Theories assume
that your previous language experience and semantic content shapes your
sentence processing abilities. In fact, for Expectation Based Theories, greater
semantic information (more words) in the sentence helps sharpen your
expectations and guides your processing, whereas Memory Based Theories would
predict that this impairs in processing. Based on this theory, sentence 2 is
harder to process because it follows an Object-Subject-Word order. We are used
to hearing Subject-Verb-Object orders in English, so this violates our
expectations.
Even though the theories were
difficult to disentangle in this paper, there are two interesting ideas in this
paper: Memory limits may constrain language processing, and language processing
may be limited by a lack of language knowledge. Considering which of these
resources may be impacting language processing may help to understand a
particular individual’s language functioning.
Blogger: Nicolette Noonan
No comments:
Post a Comment