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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
Ristic, Bojana; Mancini, Simona; Molinaro, Nicola; Staub, Adrian
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.
American Psychological Association. Journals Department, 750 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. Tel: 800-374-2721; Tel: 202-336-5510; Fax: 202-336-5502; e-mail: order@apa.org; Web site: http://www.apa.org
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