ERIC Number: EJ1374145
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Jun
Pages: 10
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0278-7393
EISSN: EISSN-1939-1285
Maintenance Cost in the Processing of Subject-Verb Dependencies
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v48 n6 p829-838 Jun 2022
Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or phoneme-monitoring tasks. In the current study, we used eye tracking during reading to test whether maintaining a long-distance SV dependency results in a processing cost on an intervening adverbial clause. In Experiment 1, we studied this question in Spanish and found that both go-past reading times and regressions out of an adverbial clause to the previous regions were significantly increased when the clause interrupts a SV dependency compared to when the same clause doesn't interrupt this dependency. We then replicated these findings in English (Experiment 2), observing significantly increased go-past reading times on a clause interrupting a SV dependency. The current study provides the first eye-tracking data showing a maintenance cost in the processing of SV dependencies cross-linguistically. Sentence comprehension models should account for the maintenance cost generated by SV dependency processing, and future research should focus on the nature of the maintained representation.
Descriptors: Sentences, Reading Comprehension, Verbs, Form Classes (Languages), Reading Processes, Eye Movements, Phonemes, Reading Rate, Pacing, Spanish, Adults, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Spain
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A