Cross-serial dependencies in Dutch: testing the influence of NP type on processing load.
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.
Kaan
Edith
E
University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA. kaan@ufl.edu
Vasić
Nada
N
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception