Canonical word order and interference-based integration costs during sentence comprehension: The case of Spanish subject- and object-relative clauses

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Volumn 65, Issue 11, 2012, Pages 2108-2128

  del Río, David ^a,b   López Higes, Ramón ^a   Martín Aragoneses, María Teresa ^c  

^a UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID   (Spain)

^b TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF MADRID   (Spain)

^c UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA   (Spain)

Author keywords

Canonicity; Self paced reading; Syntactic processing; Thematic roles; Working memory

Indexed keywords

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; ARTICLE; COMPREHENSION; FEMALE; HISPANIC; HUMAN; LINGUISTICS; MALE; OBJECT RELATION; PHYSIOLOGY; REACTION TIME; READING; SEMANTICS; SHORT TERM MEMORY;

ADOLESCENT; ADULT; COMPREHENSION; FEMALE; HISPANIC AMERICANS; HUMANS; MALE; MEMORY, SHORT-TERM; OBJECT ATTACHMENT; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; REACTION TIME; READING; SEMANTICS; VOCABULARY; YOUNG ADULT;

EID: 84867878699     PISSN: 17470218     EISSN: 17470226     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2012.674951     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Aissen, J. 2003. Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 21: 435-483. (doi:10.1023/A:1024109008573)
2. Altmann, G. T. M. 1998. Ambiguity in sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(4): 146-151. (doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(98)01153-X)
3. Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J. and Bates, D. M. 2008. Mixed-effects modelling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59: 390-412. (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005)
4. Bartek, B., Lewis, R. L., Vasishth, S. and Smith, M. R. 2011. In search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 37: 1178-1198. (doi:10.1037/a0024194)
5. Baudiffier, V., Caplan, D., Gaonac'h, D. and Chesnet, D. 2011. The effect of noun animacy on the processing of unambiguous sentences: Evidence from French relative clauses. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64: 1896-1905. (doi:10.1080/17470218.2011.608851)
6. Betancort, M., Carreiras, M. and Sturt, P. 2009. The processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish: An eye-tracking study. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62(10): 1915-1929. (doi:10.1080/17470210902866672)
7. Bornkessel, I. and Schlesewsky, M. 2006. The extended argument dependency model: A neurocognitive approach to sentence comprehension across languages. Psychological Review, 113(4): 787-821. (doi:10.1037/0033-295X.113.4.787)
8. Butler, C. S. 1992. A corpus-based approach to relative clauses in the spoken Spanish of Madrid. Hispanic Linguistics, 5(1-2): 1-42.
9. Carreiras, M., Duñabeitia, J. A., Vergara, M., de la Cruz-Pavia, I. and Laka, I. 2010. Subject relative clauses are not universally easier to process: Evidence from Basque. Cognition, 115(1): 79-92. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.11.012)
10. Christianson, K., Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J. and Ferreira, F. 2001. Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology, 42: 368-407. (doi:10.1006/cogp.2001.0752)
11. Clark, H. H. 1973. The language-as-fixed effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12: 335-359. (doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(73)80014-3)
12. Clifton, C. and Frazier, L. 1989. "Comprehending sentences with long-distance dependencies". In Linguistic structures in language processing, Edited by: Carlson, G. N. and Tanenhaus, M. K. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
13. Demberg, V. and Keller, F. 2008. Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity. Cognition, 109(2): 193-210. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.008)
14. De Vicenzi, M. 1991. Syntactic parsing strategies in Italian, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
15. Di Domenico, A. and Di Matteo, R. 2009. Processing Italian relative clauses: Working memory span and word order effects on RTs. The Journal of General Psychology, 136(4): 387-406. (doi:10.1080/00221300903266671)
16. Ferreira, F. 2003. The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 47(2): 164-203. (doi:10.1016/S0010-0285(03)00005-7)
17. Ferreira, F., Bailey, K. G. D. and Ferraro, V. 2002. Good-enough representations in language comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(1): 11-15. (doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00158)
18. Ferreira, F. and Clifton, C. 1986. The independence of syntactic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 25: 348-368. (doi:10.1016/0749-596X(86)90006-9)
19. Gennari, S. P. and MacDonald, M. C. 2008. Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses. Journal of Memory and Language, 58: 161-187. (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.07.004)
20. Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68: 1-76. (doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00034-1)
21. Gibson, E. 2000. "The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity". In Image, language, brain, Edited by: Marantz, A., Miyashita, Y. and O'Neil, W. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
22. Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R. and Johnson, M. 2001. Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 27(6): 1411-1423. (doi:10.1037/0278-7393.27.6.1411)
23. Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., Johnson, M. and Lee, Y. 2006. Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 32(6): 1304-1321. (doi:10.1037/0278-7393.32.6.1304)
24. Grodner, D. and Gibson, E. 2005. Consequences of the serial nature of linguistic input for sentential complexity. Cognitive Science, 29(2): 261-290. (doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_7)
25. Gutiérrez-Bravo, R. 2003. "Subject inversion in Spanish relative clauses. A case of prosody-induced word order variation without narrow focus". In Romance languages and linguistic theory, Edited by: Geerts, T. and Jacobs, H. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
26. Hale, J. 2001. A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 2, pp. 159-166. Pittsburgh, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics
27. Hsiao, F. and Gibson, E. 2003. Processing relative clauses in Chinese. Cognition, 90: 3-27. (doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00124-0)
28. Jaeger, T. F. 2008. Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 59: 434-446. (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.11.007)
29. Just, M. A. and Carpenter, P. A. 1980. A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. Psychological Review, 87(4): 329-354. (doi:10.1037/0033-295X.87.4.329)
30. Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., Keller, T. A., Eddy, W. F. and Thulborn, K. R. 1996. Brain activation modulated by sentence comprehension. Science, 274(5284): 114-116. (doi:10.1126/science.274.5284.114)
31. Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A. and Woolley, J. D. 1982. Paradigms and processes in reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 111(2): 228-238. (doi:10.1037/0096-3445.111.2.228)
32. Kaan, E. and Vasic, N. 2004. Cross-serial dependencies in Dutch: Testing the influence of NP type on processing load. Memory & Cognition, 32(2): 175-184. (doi:10.3758/BF03196850)
33. Kaiser, E. and Trueswell, J. C. 2004. The role of discourse context in the processing of a flexible word-order language. Cognition, 94: 113-147. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2004.01.002)
34. Kamide, Y., Scheepers, C. and Altmann, G. T. M. 2003. Integration of syntactic and semantic information in predictive processing: Cross-linguistic evidence from German and English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32(1): 37-55. (doi:10.1023/A:1021933015362)
35. Kennedy, A. and Pynte, J. 2005. Parafoveal-on-foveal effects in normal reading. Vision Research, 45: 153-168. (doi:10.1016/j.visres.2004.07.037)
36. King, J. and Just, M. A. 1991. Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30: 580-602. (doi:10.1016/0749-596X(91)90027-H)
37. King, J. and Kutas, M. 1995. Who did what and when? Using word- and clause-level ERPs to monitor working memory usage in reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 7(3): 376-395. (doi:10.1162/jocn.1995.7.3.376)
38. Leonetti, M. 2003. "Specificity and object marking: The case of Spanish a". In Proceedings of the workshop "Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Specificity in Romance Languages", Edited by: von Heusinger, K. and Kaiser, G. A. Konstanz, Germany: Fachbereich Sparachwissenchaft.
39. Levy, R. 2008. Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106(3): 1126-1177. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.006)
40. Lewis, R. L. and Vasishth, S. 2005. An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science, 29: 375-419. (doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_25)
41. Lewis, R. L., Vasishth, S. and Van Dyke, J. A. 2006. Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(10): 447-454. (doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.08.007)
42. MacDonald, M. C. and Christiansen, M. H. 2002. Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109(1) 35-54; discussion 55-74 (doi:10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.35)
43. MacWhinney, B. and Pleh, C. 1988. The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian. Cognition, 29: 95-141. (doi:10.1016/0010-0277(88)90034-0)
44. Mak, W. M., Vonk, W. and Schriefers, H. 2006. Animacy in processing relative clauses: The hickers that rocks crush. Journal of Memory and Language, 54: 466-490. (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.01.001)
45. R Development Core Team. 2011. R: A language and environment for statistical computing, Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org/
46. Raaijmakers, J. G. W. 2003. A further look at the "language-as-fixed-effect fallacy". Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57(3): 141-151.
47. Raaijmakers, J. G. W., Schrijnemakers, J. M. C. and Gremmen, F. 1999. How to deal with "the language as fixed-effect fallacy": Common misconceptions and alternative solutions. Journal of Memory and Language, 41: 416-426. (doi:10.1006/jmla.1999.2650)
48. Sanford, A. J. and Sturt, P. 2002. Depth of processing in language comprehension: Not noticing the evidence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6(9): 382-386. (doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(02)01958-7)
49. Staub, A. 2010. Eye movements and processing difficulty in object relative clauses. Cognition, 116: 71-86. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.04.002)
50. Sturt, P. 2007. Semantic re-interpretation and garden path recovery. Cognition, 105: 477-488. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.10.009)
51. Swets, B., Desmet, T., Clifton, C. Jr. and Ferreira, F. 2008. Underspecification of syntactic ambiguities: Evidence from self-paced reading. Memory & Cognition, 36(1): 201-216. (doi:10.3758/MC.36.1.201)
52. Tabor, W., Galantucci, B. and Richardson, D. 2004. Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 50: 355-370. (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2004.01.001)
53. Townsend, D. J. and Bever, T. G. 2001. Sentence comprehension. The integration of habits and rules, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
54. Traxler, M. J., Morris, R. K. and Seely, R. E. 2002. Processing subject and object relative clauses: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 47(1): 69-90. (doi:10.1006/jmla.2001.2836)
55. Traxler, M. J., Williams, R. S., Blozis, S. A. and Morris, R. K. 2005. Working memory, animacy, and verb class in the processing of relative clauses. Journal of Memory and Language, 53(2): 204-224. (doi:10.1016/j.jml.2005.02.010)
56. Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K. and Garnsey, S. M. 1994. Semantic influences on parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 33: 285-318. (doi:10.1006/jmla.1994.1014)
57. Van Dyke, J. A. 2007. Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents during sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 33(2): 407-430. (doi:10.1037/0278-7393.33.2.407)
58. Van Dyke, J. A. and Lewis, R. L. 2003. Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment and repair: A cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalyzed ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language, 49: 285-316. (doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00081-0)
59. Vasishth, S. and Lewis, R. 2006. Argument-head distance and processing complexity: Explaining both locality and antilocality effects. Language, 82: 767-794. (doi:10.1353/lan.2006.0236)
60. Warren, T., White, S. J. and Reichle, E. D. 2009. Investigating the causes of wrap-up effects: Evidence from eye-movements and E-Z reader. Cognition, 111: 132-137. (doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.12.011)
61. Waters, G. S., Caplan, D. and Yampolsky, S. 2003. On-line syntactic processing under concurrent memory load. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10(1): 88-95. (doi:10.3758/BF03196471)