Distinguishing theories of syntactic expectation cost in sentence comprehension: evidence from Japanese

Nakatani, Kentaro; Gibson, Edward

doi:10.1515/ling.2008.003

Cited by 44 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Research to date suggests, for example, that verb-medial languages such as English tend to exhibit locality effects (consistent with memorybased theories), whereas verb-final languages such as Japanese, Hindi, or German tend to exhibit anti-locality effects (consistent with expectation-based theories; see, e.g. Konieczny, 1996Konieczny, , 2000Konieczny & Döring, 2003;Nakatani & Gibson, 2008. While there are some exceptions to this generalisation, 10 as observe, the possibility of this type of language dependency opens up new sets of research questions: which linguistic properties might determine particular patterns of processing difficulty (in keeping with the predictions of one or other theory)?…”

Section: Syntactic Complexity and Comprehension Difficultymentioning

confidence: 80%

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

Norcliffe

Harris

Jaeger

2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Recent years have seen a small but growing body of psycholinguistic research focused on typologically diverse languages. This represents an important development for the field, where theorising is still largely guided by the often implicit assumption of universality. This paper introduces a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience devoted to the topic of cross-linguistic and field-based approaches to the study of psycholinguistics. The papers in this issue draw on data from a variety of genetically and areally divergent languages, to address questions in the production and comprehension of phonology, morphology, words, and sentences. To contextualise these studies, we provide an overview of the field of cross-linguistic psycholinguistics, from its early beginnings to the present day, highlighting instances where cross-linguistic data have significantly contributed to psycholinguistic theorising

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Section: Syntactic Complexity and Comprehension Difficultymentioning

confidence: 80%

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

Norcliffe

Harris

Jaeger

2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…Locality effects have been observed for a range of different constructions in English (Gibson, 1998), while expectation effects (also known as anti-locality effects when the issue is the effect of pre-verbal dependents on verb processing times) have been reported for German, Japanese, and Hindi (Konieczny, 2000;Konieczny & Döring, 2003;Nakatani & Gibson, 2008;, and more recently also for English (Demberg & Keller, 2008a;Jaeger et al, 2008). However, ours is the first demonstration to our knowledge that both expectation and locality effects can occur in the same structure in the same language, and that the two effects interact with each other.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, locality effects have been elusive in many other languages, including German, Japanese, and Hindi, where anti-locality effects of the type found by Konieczny & Döring have been reported (Konieczny, 2000;Nakatani & Gibson, 2008;: adding a preverbal dependent facilitates rather than hinders processing at the clause-final verb. A locality-based interpretation of the Konieczny & Döring results might be that the traditional method of quantifying integration cost is wrong.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectation and Locality Effects in German Verb-final Structures

Lévy¹,

Keller²

2016

Preprint

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Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both locality effects, in which more dependents preceding a governing verb increase processing difficulty at the verb, and anti-locality effects, in which more preceding dependents facilitate processing at the verb. However, no controlled study has previously demonstrated both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation within the same language. Additionally, many previous demonstrations of anti-locality effects have been potentially confounded with lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. Here, we provide new evidence of both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation in a single language-verb-final constructions in German-while controlling for lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. In main clauses, we find clear anti-locality effects, with the presence of a preceding dative argument facilitating processing at the final verb; in subjectextracted relative clauses with identical linear ordering of verbal dependents, we find both antilocality and locality effects, with processing facilitated when the verb is preceded by a dative argument alone, but hindered when the verb is preceded by both the dative argument and an adjunct. These results indicate that both expectations and memory limitations need to be accounted for in any complete theory of online syntactic comprehension.

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“…Locality effects have been observed for a range of different constructions in English (Gibson, 1998), while expectation effects (also known as anti-locality effects when the issue is the effect of pre-verbal dependents on verb processing times) have been reported for German, Japanese, and Hindi (Konieczny, 2000; Konieczny & Döring, 2003; Nakatani & Gibson, 2008; Vasishth & Lewis, 2006), and more recently also for English (Demberg & Keller, 2008a; Jaeger et al, 2008). However, ours is the first demonstration to our knowledge that both expectation and locality effects can occur in the same structure in the same language, and that the two effects interact with each other.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, locality effects have been elusive in many other languages, including German, Japanese, and Hindi, where anti-locality effects of the type found by Konieczny & Döring have been reported (Konieczny, 2000; Nakatani & Gibson, 2008; Vasishth & Lewis, 2006): adding a preverbal dependent facilitates rather than hinders processing at the clause-final verb. A locality-based interpretation of the Konieczny & Döring results might be that the traditional method of quantifying integration cost is wrong.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectation and locality effects in German verb-final structures

Lévy

Keller

2013

Journal of Memory and Language

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Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both locality effects, in which more dependents preceding a governing verb increase processing difficulty at the verb, and anti-locality effects, in which more preceding dependents facilitate processing at the verb. However, no controlled study has previously demonstrated both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation within the same language. Additionally, many previous demonstrations of anti-locality effects have been potentially confounded with lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. Here, we provide new evidence of both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation in a single language—verb-final constructions in German—while controlling for lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. In main clauses, we find clear anti-locality effects, with the presence of a preceding dative argument facilitating processing at the final verb; in subject-extracted relative clauses with identical linear ordering of verbal dependents, we find both anti-locality and locality effects, with processing facilitated when the verb is preceded by a dative argument alone, but hindered when the verb is preceded by both the dative argument and an adjunct. These results indicate that both expectations and memory limitations need to be accounted for in any complete theory of online syntactic comprehension.

show abstract

Distinguishing theories of syntactic expectation cost in sentence comprehension: evidence from Japanese

Cited by 44 publications

References 27 publications

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

Expectation and Locality Effects in German Verb-final Structures

Expectation and locality effects in German verb-final structures

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