Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages

Abstract

The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing. We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexity metric, one that reflects a minimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender's degree of uncertainty at each point in a sentence. We use this idea to quantify the intuition that people do comprehension work as they incrementally resolve ambiguity, word by word. We find that downward changes to this quantitative measure of uncertainty derive observed processing contrasts between Subject-and Object-extracted relative clauses. This demonstrates that the complexity metric, in conjunction with a minimalist grammar and corpus-based weights, accounts for the widely-observed Subject Advantage. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article

Relative clauses as a benchmark for Minimalist parsing

“…This has been attributed to structural ambiguities (Gibson and Wu 2013), which is corroborated by Yun et al (2014) and their ambiguity-based account rooted in entropy reduction. Recall from Section 2.3, though, that we deliberately ignore ambiguity in this paper so that only tree-geometric aspects of the derivation can derive processing effects.…”

“…Note that the difficulty metric only has to account for overall sentence difficulty. This is different from more ambitious approaches such as Hale (2001) and Yun et al (2014), which seek to predict online difficulty, i.e. how difficulty increases or decreases with each word in the input.…”

“…This causes the wh-movement analysis and the promotion analysis to diverge more noticeably. In the promotion analysis, the RC is no longer a CP, but rather a RelP that contains a CP (see also Yun et al 2014). The head noun still moves from within the RC to Spec,CP, but this is followed by the TP moving to Spec,RelP.…”

Abstract linguistic structure correlates with temporal activity during naturalistic comprehension

“…While information-theoretical complexity metrics like surprisal are well-defined for MGs (Hale, 2003; Yun et al, 2015; Hunter & Dyer, To Appear), computing their values from wide-coverage grammars requires approximations analogous to those typically applied with CFGs (Charniak et al, 1998; Klein & Manning, 2003a). Such techniques are a current focus of MG parsing research (e.g.…”

Entropy Reduction correlates with temporal lobe activity

“…It relates the comprehension difficulty that people experience at a word to decreases in uncertainty regarding the grammatical alternatives that are in play at any given point in a sentence (for a review, see Hale 2016). Entropy Reduction plays a key role in accounts of many classic psycholinguistic phenomena (Hale 2003;2004;2006) including the difficulty profile of prenominal relative clauses (Yun et al, 2015). It has connected a wide range of behavioral measures to many * , † additional affiliation: Université Paris 11 * additional affiliation: Collège de France different theoretical ideas about incremental processing, both with controlled stimuli (Linzen and Jaeger, 2016;Wu et al, 2010) and in naturalistic texts (Frank, 2013).…”