Eye movements of young and older adults during reading

The eye movements of young and older adults were tracked as they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. In Experiment 1, cleft object and object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than cleft subject and subject relative clause sentences; however, older adults made many more regressions, resulting in increased regression path fixation times and total fixation times, than young adults while processing cleft object and object relative clause sentences. In Experiment 2, older adults experienced more difficulty than young adults while reading cleft and relative clause sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities created by deleting the that complementizers. Regression analyses indicated that readers with smaller working memories need more regressions and longer fixation times to process cleft object and object relative clause sentences. These results suggest that age-associated declines in working memory do affect syntactic processing.     

The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: a psychometric approach

In 2 studies, the authors used a combination of psychometric and experimental techniques to investigate the effects of domain-general and domain-specific working memory factors on offline decisions concerning attachment of an ambiguous relative clause. Both studies used English and Dutch stimuli presented to English- and Dutch-speaking participants, respectively. In Study 1, readers with low working memory spans were less likely to use recency strategies for disambiguation than were readers with high spans. This finding is inconsistent with predictions of locality- and resource-based accounts of attachment. Psychometric analyses showed that both domain-specific (verbal) and domain-general working memory accounted for the effect. Study 2 found support for the hypothesis that segmentation strategies imposed during silent reading can account for the counterintuitive relationship. Results suggest that readers with low spans have a greater tendency to break up large segments of text because of their limited working memory, leading to high attachment of the ambiguous relative clause.     

Effects of Age and Location in Chinese Relative Clauses Processing

Three experiments investigated Chinese relative clause processing with children, youths and elders using sentence-picture matching and self-paced reading methods. In Experiment 1, we found that object-extracted clause were easier to comprehend than subject-extracted clause , and object-modified relative clause (i.e., object-modified subject-extracted clause\(\backslash \)object-modified object-extracted clause) were difficult to comprehend than subject modified relative clause (subject-modified subject-extracted clause\(\backslash \)subject-modified object-extracted clause). Importantly, this paper also found 5–6.5 ages may be critical for children to comprehend RCs in Chinese. Experiment 2 also showed that S-ORCs were easier to comprehend than S-SRCs for youths and elders. Further, elders have more difficulty comprehending RCs than youths. Experiment 3 indicated that there were no significant differences in difficulty between O-SRCs and O-ORCs, and no differences were found between youths and elders. In general, our findings gave support to predictions of working memory-based theory, and also indicated that RCs processing has an intricate course. Many factors such as syntactic, language specificity, experience, personality, must all be considered in sentence processing.     

Effects of concurrent arithmetical and syntactic complexity on self-paced reaction times and eye fixations

Two dual-task experiments (replications of Experiments 1 and 2 in Fedorenko, Gibson, & Rohde, Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 246–269 2007) were conducted to determine whether syntactic and arithmetical operations share working memory resources. Subjects read object- or subject-extracted relative clause sentences phrase by phrase in a self-paced task while simultaneously adding or subtracting numbers. Experiment 2 measured eye fixations as well as self-paced reaction times. In both experiments, there were main effects of syntax and of mathematical operation on self-paced reading times, but no interaction of the two. In the Experiment 2 eye-tracking results, there were main effects of syntax on first-pass reading time and total reading time and an interaction between syntax and math in total reading time on the noun phrase within the relative clause. The findings point to differences in the ways individuals process sentences under these dual-task conditions, as compared with viewing sentences during “normal” reading conditions, and do not support the view that arithmetical and syntactic integration operations share a working memory system.     

Some observations on the universality of the late-closure strategy

Two questionnaire studies and a reading time experiment investigated the application of the late-closure principle in Italian, a Romance language which contrasts with English with respect to several linguistic properties. All the studies addressed interpretation preferences in sentences containing a complex NP followed by a relative clause (e.g....the son of the woman who arrived yesterday...). While the questionnaires investigated final preferences, the reading time experiment addressed also the principle governing the initial attachment of a relative clause to a complex NP. Furthermore, through a manipulation of the type of preposition within the complex NP, we investigated the role of the thematic structure of the complex NP in initial and final parsing. The results showed that the late-closure principle applies in Italian to the initial parsing without being affected by the thematic structure of the complex NP. Final interpretation instead shows an effect of pragmatic preference and an effect of thematic structure on syntactic revisions. The results are discussed in terms of a parsing model that adopts syntactic parsing strategies and makes modular use of linguistic information. Some implications for the relationship between syntactic theories and the human parser are also addressed.     

Effects of age, speed of processing, and working memory on comprehension of sentences with relative clauses

Two hundred participants, 50 in each of four age ranges (19-29, 30-49, 50-69, 70-90) were tested for working memory, speed of processing, and the processing of sentences with relative clauses. In Experiment 1, participants read four sentence types (cleft subject, cleft object, subject-subject, subject-object) in a word-by-word, non-cumulative, self-paced reading task and made speeded plausibility judgments about them. In Experiment 2, participants read two types of sentences, one of which contained a doubly center embedded relative clause. Older participants' comprehension was less accurate and there was age-related slowing of online processing times in all but the simplest sentences, which increased in syntactically complex sentences in Experiment 1. This pattern suggests an age-related decrease in the efficiency of parsing and interpretation. Slower speed of processing and lower working memory were associated with longer online processing times only in Experiment 2, suggesting that task-related operations are related to general speed of processing and working memory. Lower working memory was not associated with longer reading times in more complex sentences, consistent with the view that general working memory is not critically involved in online syntactic processing. Longer online processing at the most demanding point in the most demanding sentence was associated with better comprehension, indicating that it reflects effective processing under some certain circumstances. However, the poorer comprehension performance of older individuals indicates that their slower online processing reflects inefficient processing even at these points.     

Prosodic phrasing and attachment preferences

The attachment of a relative clause (RC) has been found to differ across languages when its head noun is a complex NP. One attempt to explain the attachment differences is the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) proposed by Fodor (1998, 2002). The goal of this paper is to show how the default phrasing of a sentence (explicit prosody), defined phonologically, differs across seven languages (English, Greek, Spanish, French, Farsi, Japanese, and Korean), and how the prosodic phrasing of a sentence in each language, both default and nondefault, matches the interpretation of RC attachment by individual speakers. Observed tendencies show that there is a direct relationship between the prosodic phrasing and the interpretation of RC attachment, strongly supporting the IPH. In addition, the paper discusses the status of default phrasing and the factors affecting the default phrasing, including rhythmic and syntactic factors and their interactions.     

An on-line study of Japanese nesting complexity

This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materials consisted of four versions of successively more nested syntactic structures. It was found that (1) people read the more nested materials slower than the less nested materials; and (2) the locus of the relative slowdown occurred early in the nested structures. There was no corresponding slowdown when processing the verbs at the end of each clause. The results are therefore not predicted by retrieval-based integration accounts of syntactic complexity. Rather, the results support expectation-based accounts of syntactic complexity for these materials.     

The Role of Animacy in Children's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence–Picture Matching and Eye Movements

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs (“The book that the boy is reading”). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., “Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing”). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5–6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head-noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head-nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head-noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., “where is the tractor that the car is following”) to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity-based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short-term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1.     

Effects of Irrelevant Sounds on Phonological Coding in Reading Comprehension and Short term Memory

The effects of irrelevant sounds on reading comprehension and short-term memory were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, adults judged the acceptability of written sentences during irrelevent speech, accompanied and unaccompanied singing, instrumental music, and in silence. Sentences varied in syntactic complexity: Simple sentences contained a right-branching relative clause ( The applause pleased the woman that gave the speech ) and syntactically complex sentences included a centre-embedded relative clause ( The hay that the farmer stored fed the hungry animals ). Unacceptable sentences either sounded acceptable ( The dog chased the cat that eight up all his food ) or did not ( The man praised the child that sight up his spinach ). Decision accuracy was impaired by syntactic complexity but not by irrelevant sounds. Phonological coding was indicated by increased errors on unacceptable sentences that sounded correct. These error rates were unaffected by irrelevant sounds. Experiment 2 examined effects of irrelevant sounds on ordered recall of phonologically similar and dissimilar word lists. Phonological similarity impaired recall. Irrelevant speech reduced recall but did not interact with phonological similarity. The results of these experiments question assumptions about the relationship between speech input and phonological coding in reading and the short-term store.     

The on-line resolution of the sentence complement/relative clause ambiguity: evidence from Spanish

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated syntactic ambiguity resolution in Spanish. The experiments examined the way in which Spanish subjects initially interpret sentences that are temporarily ambiguous between a sentence complement and a relative clause interpretation. Experiment 1 examined whether the sentence complement preference found in English is observed in Spanish speaking subjects. In Experiment 2, verbal mood was manipulated in order to study the influence of verb-specific information on sentence processing. Since subcategorization for a subjunctive complement clause is generally assumed to be a lexical property of some verbs, the manipulation of the mood of the embedded verb affords us an interesting and novel way to examine the influence of lexical information on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 showed that Spanish speakers initially interpret the ambiguous that-clause as a sentence complement. Experiment 2 showed that verb-specific information, in particular, the information that specificies that a verb subcategorizes for a subjunctive complement, is accessed and used rapidly and affects the ambiguity resolution process. The results are discussed in relation to current models of sentence processing.     

Anticipating explanations in relative clause processing

We show that comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced reading study examined readers’ expectations for high/low relative-clause attachments following implicit-causality and non-implicit causality verbs (John detests/babysits the children of the musician who…). In the off-line study, the widely reported low-attachment preference for English is observed in the non-implicit causality condition, but this preference gives way to more high attachments in the implicit-causality condition in cases in which (i) the verb’s causally implicated referent occupies the high-attachment position and (ii) the relative clause provides an explanation for the event described by the matrix clause (e.g., …who are arrogant and rude). In the on-line study, a similar preference for high attachment emerges in the implicit-causality context—crucially, before the occurrence of any linguistic evidence that the RC does in fact provide an explanation—whereas the low-attachment preference is consistent elsewhere. These findings constitute the first demonstration that expectations about ensuing discourse coherence relationships can elicit full reversals in syntactic attachment preferences, and that these discourse-level expectations can affect on-line disambiguation as rapidly as lexical and morphosyntactic cues.     

Use of Memory-Load Interference in Processing Spoken Chinese Relative Clauses

The processing advantage of Subject-gapped relative clause (SRC) versus Object-gapped relative clause (ORC) has been advocated by competing processing accounts. Using a self-paced listening paradigm, this study investigates what Chinese RC online processing asymmetry looks like under concurrent memory load manipulation. Both On-line listening times and Post-online measures of Chinese SRCs and ORCs are estimated and compared. The on-line results show that ORCs and SRCs demonstrate no differential processing patterns under the interfering conditions. At the relativizer-DE marker region, under 0-digt-load, SRCs show processing advantage, while under 5-digit-load condition, SRCs display greater listening times than ORCs. Furthermore, the Post-online RTs and accuracy of post-sentence comprehension and digit recalls show that processing of SRCs had worse performance. These results lead to the conjecture that there may be no intrinsic processing asymmetry in Chinese RCs, and underscore the necessity that future studies in exploring the processing metrics of sentence complexity should consider the working memory involvement.     

Syntactic priming of relative clause attachments: persistence of structural configuration in sentence production

Three sentence completion experiments will be reported in which participants had to generate German equivalents of "the servant of the actress who..." (NP-of-NP-RC) constructions. Target fragments (which were unconstrained as to whether the relative pronoun permitted high or low attachment) were preceded by constrained prime fragments, which were either structurally congruent with the targets (Experiments 1 and 2) or structurally incongruent with the targets (anaphoric adverbial clauses rather than relative clauses (RCs), Experiment 3). While the first two experiments established reliable repetition of RC attachments between primes and targets, Experiment 3 failed to obtain a significant priming effect, indicating that RC attachment priming is dependent on a syntactic overlap between primes and targets. The results suggest a tendency of language producers to retain hierarchical syntactic relations over consecutive trials. Current models of syntactic priming in production do not offer an explanatory mechanism for this kind of observation as they presently stand.     

汉、英工作记忆的加工和储存对中学生英语阅读理解的影响

本研究采用"视空间和言语交替"任务范式分离言语工作记忆的加工和储存两个成分,分别探讨了英语工作记忆的加工和储存成分对我国中学生英语阅读理解的作用及其途径,以及汉语工作记忆的加工和储存成分对中学生英语阅读理解是否具有跨语言影响。98名初中二年级学生完成了一般认知能力、英语阅读理解、汉语和英语工作记忆任务。结果表明:(1)英语工作记忆的加工和储存成分对英语阅读理解均有显著的独立预测作用;(2)英语工作记忆的储存成分对英语阅读理解的作用部分是由加工成分引起的;(3)汉语工作记忆的加工成分对英语阅读理解没有显著的直接预测作用,但却以英语工作记忆的加工成分为中介间接作用于英语阅读理解;汉语工作记忆的储存成分对英语阅读理解没有显著的预测作用。可见,言语工作记忆是一个多成分系统,加工和储存两个成分是相对分离的,并且它们具有不同的跨语言特性,加工存在跨语言一般性,而储存则具有语言特异性。     

Chinese subject-relative clauses are more difficult to process than the object-relative clauses

This paper presents an experiment that compared high and low working memory span readers' abilities to process Chinese subject-relative and object-relative clause structures in a self-paced reading paradigm. Comprehension performance results indicated that the object-relative structure was easier to understand than the subject-relative structure. Reading time results showed that participants with low working memory span read the subject-relative structures more slowly than the object-relative structures, but there was no reading time difference for the high working memory span participants. The experiment provides further evidence that the Chinese subject-relative clause structure is more difficult to process than the Chinese object-relative clause structure, especially for low working memory span individuals. Furthermore, these results support a syntactic storage account of the observed complexity difference.     

Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: a computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar

We present the design, implementation and simulation results of a psycholinguistic model of human syntactic processing that meets major empirical criteria. The parser operates in conjunction with a lexicalist grammar and is driven by syntactic information associated with heads of phrases. The dynamics of the model are based on competition by lateral inhibition ('competitive inhibition'). Input words activate lexical frames (i.e. elementary trees anchored to input words) in the mental lexicon, and a network of candidate 'unification links' is set up between frame nodes. These links represent tentative attachments that are graded rather than all-or-none. Candidate links that, due to grammatical or 'treehood' constraints, are incompatible, compete for inclusion in the final syntactic tree by sending each other inhibitory signals that reduce the competitor's attachment strength. The outcome of these local and simultaneous competitions is controlled by dynamic parameters, in particular by the Entry Activation and the Activation Decay rate of syntactic nodes, and by the Strength and Strength Build-up rate of Unification links. In case of a successful parse, a single syntactic tree is returned that covers the whole input string and consists of lexical frames connected by winning Unification links. Simulations are reported of a significant range of psycholinguistic parsing phenomena in both normal and aphasic speakers of English: (i) various effects of linguistic complexity (single versus double, center versus right-hand self-embeddings of relative clauses; the difference between relative clauses with subject and object extraction; the contrast between a complement clause embedded within a relative clause versus a relative clause embedded within a complement clause); (ii) effects of local and global ambiguity, and of word-class and syntactic ambiguity (including recency and length effects); (iii) certain difficulty-of-reanalysis effects (contrasts between local ambiguities that are easy to resolve versus ones that lead to serious garden-path effects); (iv) effects of agrammatism on parsing performance, in particular the performance of various groups of aphasic patients on several sentence types.     

Differences in Noun and Verb Processing in Lexical Decision Cannot be Attributed to Word Form and Morphological Complexity Alone

It has been suggested that the effect of word category in noun and verb processing reflects typical word class properties, which can be characterized in terms of semantic as well as syntactic and morphological features. The present study is aimed at differentiating and discussing the relative contribution of these aspects with a main focus on syntactic and morphological processing. Experiment 1 established a processing advantage for nouns in German visual lexical decision, using nouns denoting biological and man-made objects as compared to transitive and intransitive verbs. Experiment 2 showed that the noun advantage persisted even when the morphological differences between word categories were reduced by using identical suffixes in nouns and verbs. Overall results suggest that the processing differences cannot be reduced to variables such as frequency, word form, or morphological complexity. Reaction time differences between transitive and intransitive verbs strengthen the role of syntactic information. In line with previous accounts the observed effects are discussed in terms of a category-specific combination of linguistic parameters.     

Agreement Checking in Comprehension: Evidence from Relative Clauses

Work on agreement processing in comprehension in English has provided evidence that the plural feature is specified or marked and that the syntactic structure of the subject plays a role in checking features. It is argued here that the structure intervening between the subject and verb also plays a role in checking and that there is pressure to check features immediately. A self-paced reading study tested this proposal in a previously unstudied configuration: agreement between the verb in a subject relative clause (RC) and the relative clause head (e.g., the niece of the actors who was/were¨). According to the Construal Hypothesis (Frazier and Clifton, 1995), the structural relation between the RC and head is not immediately fully specified (unlike, for example, the relation between the subject and verb of a main clause). Thus, at the point when an agreeing verb is processed, the structure underlying the check may not yet be fully specified. This assumption about structural processing, together with the proposal for agreement checking in comprehension predicts (1) that there will be a large asymmetry between the processing of singular and plural agreeing verbs in the RC (larger than those seen in direct subject-verb predication) and (2) that there could be a role for agreement in determining RC attachment. Clear evidence for the first prediction was found; evidence for the second was inconclusive.