title: Cross-serial dependencies in Dutch: testing the influence of NP type on processing load.
abstract: We tested the cross-linguistic generalizability of three models of sentence processing complexity--Lewis (1996), Gibson (1998, 2000), and Gordon (Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001; Gordon, Hendrick, & Levine, 2002)--by investigating the on-line processing of cross-serial dependencies in Dutch. The number of subject-verb relations in a clause was manipulated, as well as type of noun phrase (indexical pronouns vs. proper names or full definite NPs). Several of our findings diverged from Gibson's model: Processing difficulty at the verbs was not affected by the use of proper names versus first- and second-person pronouns; an increase at the first verb was seen for full NPs versus pronouns in 3-verb constructions, which was predicted by the Gibson model, but is in contrast to Lewis's model. These findings are best explained within the framework of similarity-based inference models (Gordon et al., 2001; Gordon et al., 2002), according to which the number of similar NPs affects processing difficulty at the point of retrieval, and not specifically their discourse status or syntactic function.
authors.affiliation: University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA. kaan@ufl.edu
authors.forename: Edith
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kaan
authors.forename: Nada
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Vasić
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception