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The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses

Although syntactic complexity has been investigated across dozens of studies, the available data still greatly underdetermine relevant theories of processing difficulty. Memory-based and expectation-based theories make opposite predictions regarding fine-grained time course of processing difficulty...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Levy, Roger, Fedorenko, Evelina, Gibson, Edward
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3975271/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24711687
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.10.005
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author Levy, Roger
Fedorenko, Evelina
Gibson, Edward
author_facet Levy, Roger
Fedorenko, Evelina
Gibson, Edward
author_sort Levy, Roger
collection PubMed
description Although syntactic complexity has been investigated across dozens of studies, the available data still greatly underdetermine relevant theories of processing difficulty. Memory-based and expectation-based theories make opposite predictions regarding fine-grained time course of processing difficulty in syntactically constrained contexts, and each class of theory receives support from results on some constructions in some languages. Here we report four self-paced reading experiments on the online comprehension of Russian relative clauses together with related corpus studies, taking advantage of Russian’s flexible word order to disentangle predictions of competing theories. We find support for key predictions of memory-based theories in reading times at RC verbs, and for key predictions of expectation-based theories in processing difficulty at RC-initial accusative noun phrase (NP) objects, which corpus data suggest should be highly unexpected. These results suggest that a complete theory of syntactic complexity must integrate insights from both expectation-based and memory-based theories.
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spelling pubmed-39752712014-11-01 The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses Levy, Roger Fedorenko, Evelina Gibson, Edward J Mem Lang Article Although syntactic complexity has been investigated across dozens of studies, the available data still greatly underdetermine relevant theories of processing difficulty. Memory-based and expectation-based theories make opposite predictions regarding fine-grained time course of processing difficulty in syntactically constrained contexts, and each class of theory receives support from results on some constructions in some languages. Here we report four self-paced reading experiments on the online comprehension of Russian relative clauses together with related corpus studies, taking advantage of Russian’s flexible word order to disentangle predictions of competing theories. We find support for key predictions of memory-based theories in reading times at RC verbs, and for key predictions of expectation-based theories in processing difficulty at RC-initial accusative noun phrase (NP) objects, which corpus data suggest should be highly unexpected. These results suggest that a complete theory of syntactic complexity must integrate insights from both expectation-based and memory-based theories. 2013-06-17 2013-11-01 /pmc/articles/PMC3975271/ /pubmed/24711687 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.10.005 Text en © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Article
Levy, Roger
Fedorenko, Evelina
Gibson, Edward
The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses
title The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses
title_full The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses
title_fullStr The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses
title_full_unstemmed The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses
title_short The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses
title_sort syntactic complexity of russian relative clauses
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3975271/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24711687
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.10.005
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