Frequency affects object relative clause processing: Some evidence in favor of usage-based accounts

Language Learning

Volumn 64, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 685-714

  Reali, Florencia ^a  

^a UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES   (Colombia)

Author keywords

Complexity judgments; Corpus analysis; L1 processing; Nested structure; Object relative clauses; Self paced reading; Spanish L1; Usage based approaches

Indexed keywords

EID: 84906227021     PISSN: 00238333     EISSN: 14679922     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/lang.12066     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. 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 Experiemental Psychology, 64, 1896-1905.
2. 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, 1915-1929.
3. Bybee, J., and Hopper, P. (2001). Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
4. Bybee, J., and Scheibman, J. (1999). The effect of usage on degrees of constituency: The reduction of don't in English. Linguistics, 37, 575-596.
5. Christiansen, M. H., and MacDonald, M. C. (2009). A usage-based approach to recursion in sentence processing. Language Learning, 59, 126-161.
6. Cohen, J. (1992). Statistics a power primer. Psychology Bulletin, 112, 155-159.
7. Crocker, M. W., and Corley, S. (2002). Modular architectures and statistical mechanisms. In P. Merlo and S. Stevenson (Eds.), The lexical basis of sentence processing (pp. 157-180). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
8. Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
9. del Río, D., López-Higes, R., and Martín-Aragoneses, M. T. (2012). 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, 65, 2108-2128.
10. Dabrowska, E. (2000). From formula to schema: The acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Linguistics, 11, 83-102.
11. Diessel, H. (2009). On the role of frequency and similarity in the acquisition of subject and non-subject relative clauses. In T. Givón and M. Shibatani (Eds.), Syntactic complexity (pp. 251-276). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
12. Diessel, H., and Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language, 81, 882-906.
13. Frazier, L., and Clifton, C. (1989). Successive cyclicity in the grammar and the parser. Language and Cognitive Processes, 4, 93-126.
14. Fox, B. A., and Thompson, S. A. (1990). A discourse explanation of the grammar of relative clauses in English conversation. Language, 66, 297-316.
15. Geeraerts, D., and Cuyckens, H. (2007). The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
16. Gelormini-Lezama, C., and Almor A. (2011). Repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in Spanish. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 437-454.
17. Gennari, S. P., and MacDonald, M. C. (2008). Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 161-187.
18. Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality and syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76.
19. Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Y. Miyashita, A. Marantz, and W. O'Neil (Eds.), Image, language, brain (pp. 95-126). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20. Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalizations in language. New York: Oxford University Press.
21. Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., and Johnson, M. (2001). Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 1411-1423.
22. Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., and Johnson, M. (2004). Effects of noun phrase type on sentence complexity. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 97-114.
23. Grodner, D., and Gibson, E. (2005). Consequences of the serial nature of linguistic input. Cognitive Science, 29, 261-291.
24. Holmes, V. M., and O'Regan, J. K. (1981). Eye fixation patterns during the reading of relative clause sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 417-430.
25. Hoover, M. L. (1992). Sentence processing strategies in Spanish and English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21, 275-299.
26. Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., and Woolley, J. D. (1982). Paradigms and processes and in reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 3, 228-238.
27. 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.
28. Langacker, R. (1990). Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.
29. Levy, R. (2011). Probabilistic linguistic expectations, uncertain input, and implications for eye movements in reading. Studies of Psychology and Behavior, 9, 52-63.
30. MacWhinney, B., and Pleh, C. (1988). The processing of restricted relative clauses in Hungarian. Cognition, 29, 95-141.
31. MacDonald, M. C., and Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: A comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54.
32. Mak, W. M., Vonk, W., and Schriefers, H. (2006). Animacy in processing relative clauses: The hikers that rocks crush. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 466-490.
33. Marín, M. (1991). Corpus lingüístico de referencia de la lengua española. Boletín de la Academia Argentina de Letras, 56, 129-155.
34. Mitchell, D. C., Cuetos, F., Corley, M. M. B., and Brysbaert, M. (1995). Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (non-lexical) statistical records. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 469-488.
35. Miyamoto, E., and Nakamura, M. (2003). Subject/object asymmetries in the processing of relative clauses in Japanese. Proceedings of 1831 WCCFL, 22, 342-355.
36. Nuyts, J. (2011). Pattern versus process concepts of grammar and mind: A cognitive-functional perspective. In M. Brdar, S. Th. Gries, and M. Žic Fuchs (Eds.), Cognitive linguistics: Convergence and expansion (pp. 47-66). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
37. Reali, F., and Christiansen, M. H. (2007a). Word-chunk frequencies affect the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 161-170.
38. Reali, F., and Christiansen, M. H. (2007b). Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 1-23.
39. Roland, D., Mauner, G., O'Meara, C. and Yun, H. (2012). Discourse expectations and relative clause processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 66, 479-508.
40. Schneider, W., Eschman, A., and Zuccolotto, A. (2002). E-Prime reference guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools.
41. Šidák, Z. K. (1967). Rectangular confidence regions for the means of multivariate normal distributions. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 62, 626-633.
42. Stefanowitsch, A. (2011). Cognitive linguistics meets the corpus. In M. Brdar, S.Th. Gries, and M. Žic Fuchs (Eds.), Cognitive linguistics: Convergence and expansion (pp. 257-289). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
43. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
44. Tomasello, M. (2006). Construction grammar for kids. Constructions, SV, 1-11.
45. 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, 69-90.
46. Warren, T., and Gibson, E. (2002). The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity. Cognition, 85, 79-112.
47. Wells, J., Christiansen, M. H., Race, D. S., Acheson, D., and MacDonald, M. C. (2009). Experience and sentence processing: Statistical learning and relative clause comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 250-271.