Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vvkck Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T16:34:46.892Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Parsing Complex Noun Phrases: Effects of Hierarchical Structure and Sentence Position on Memory Load

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2017

Sergio Mota  and
José Manuel Igoa
Sergio Mota
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain)
José Manuel Igoa*
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain)
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to José Manuel Igoa. Departamento de Psicología Básica. Facultad de Psicología. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Campus de Cantoblanco. 28049. Madrid (Spain). Phone: +34–914973263. Fax: +34–914975215. E-mail: josemanuel.igoa@uam.es
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper, we report two experiments in Spanish designed to find out what kind of processes underlie the online parsing of complex noun phrases (NPs). To that end, we used a ‘click detection’ paradigm coupled with an oral comprehension task with sentences made up of complex NPs comprising embedded prepositional phrases PPs or coordinate NPs. The critical NPs consisted of words or pseudowords, and were inserted either at subject position (Experiment 1) or at object position (Experiment 2) in the sentence. Results show an opposite pattern of RTs to clicks when the complex NP is located at subject (vs. object) position, with the former case showing heavier processing demands as the parser delves deeper into the complex NP, regardless of the internal constituency of the target NP and its lexical content, and the latter yielding the opposite pattern. These results suggest that structural complexity by itself does not determine an increase in processing costs during sentence parsing, which is only apparent in cases involving deferred operations like subject-verb agreement.

Keywords

hierarchical structurememory loadparsingsentence position effects
Type
Research Article
Information
The Spanish Journal of Psychology , Volume 20 , 2017 , E37
Copyright
Copyright © Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We wish to thank Ted Gibson and an anonymous reviewer for extremely helpful comments and suggestions to earlier versions of the manuscript.

References

Berent, I., & Perfetti, C. A. (1993). An on-line method in studying music parsing. Cognition, 46, 203–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(93)90010-S Google Scholar
Camacho, J. (2003). The structure of coordination conjunction and agreement phenomena in Spanish and other languages. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N., & Miller, G. (1963). Introduction to the formal analysis of natural languages. In Luce, R. D., Bush, R. R., & Galanter, E. (Eds.), Handbook of mathematical psychology (Vol. II., pp. 269–322). New York, NY: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Cohen, L., & Mehler, J. (1996). Click-monitoring revisited: An on-line study of sentence comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 24(1), 94–102. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197275 Google Scholar
Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1979). Monitoring sentence comprehension. In Cooper, W. E. & Walker, E. C. T. (Eds.), Sentence processing: Psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett (pp. 113–134). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Bock, K. (2005). Making sense of syntax: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review, 112, 531–559. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.112.3.531 Google Scholar
Forster, K. I., & Forster, J. C. (2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 35(1), 116–124. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195503 Google Scholar
Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. (1995). Construal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00034-1 Google Scholar
Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Marantz, A., Miyashita, Y., & O’Neil, W. (Eds.), Image, language, brain: Papers from the First Mind Articulation Project Symposium. (pp. 95–126). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gibson, E., Desmet, T., Grodner, D., Watson, D., & Ko, K. (2005). Reading relative clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics, 16, 313–353. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.2005.16.2.313 Google Scholar
Gómez, D. M., Bion, R. A. H., & Mehler, J. (2011). The word segmentation process as revealed by click detection. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 212–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.482451 Google Scholar
Guasch, M., Boada, R., Ferré, P., & Sánchez-Casas, R. (2013). NIM: A web-based Swiss Army knife to select stimuli for psycholinguistic studies. Behavior Research Methods, 45, 765–771. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0296-8 Google Scholar
Hahne, A., & Jescheniak, J. D. (2001). What’s left if the Jabberwock gets the semantics? An ERP investigation into semantic and syntactic processes during auditory sentence comprehension. Cognitive Brain Research, 11, 199–212. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0926-6410(00)00071-9 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hakes, D. T., Evans, J. S., & Brannon, L. L. (1976). Understanding sentences with relative clauses. Memory & Cognition, 4, 283–290. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213177 Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, V. M. (1973). Order of main and subordinate clauses in sentence perception. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12, 285–293. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(73)80072-6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, V. M., & Forster, K. I. (1970). Detection of extraneous signals during sentence recognition. Perception and Psychophysics, 7, 297–301. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210171 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, R. A. (1996). The difficulty of (so-called) self-embedded structures. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 283–314.Google Scholar
Humphries, C., Binder, J. R., Medler, D. A., & Liebenthal, E. (2007). Time course of semantic processes during sentence comprehension: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 36, 924–932. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.03.059 Google Scholar
Hung, S.-M., & Hsieh, P.-J. (2015). Syntactic processing in the absence of awareness and semantics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41, 1376–1384. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000094 Google Scholar
Johannessen, J. B. (1998). Coordination. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Karlsson, F. (2010). Multiple final embedding of clauses. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15(1), 88–105. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15.1.04kar Google Scholar
Konieczny, L. (2000). Locality and parsing complexity. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 627–645. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026528912821 Google Scholar
Lago, S., Shalom, D. E., Sigman, M., Lau, E. F., & Phillips, C. (2015). Agreement attraction in Spanish comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 82, 133–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.02.002 Google Scholar
Levy, R. P. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106, 1126–1177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.006 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewis, R. L., & Vasishth, S. (2005). An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science, 29, 375–419.Google Scholar
Lewis, R. L., Vasishth, S., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2006). Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 447–454. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.08.007 Google Scholar
Lobina, D. J., Demestre, J., & García-Albea, J. E. (in press). Disentangling perceptual and psycholinguistic factors in syntactic processing: Tone monitoring via ERPs. Behavior Research Methods.Google Scholar
MacDonald, M. C., Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 56–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(92)90003-K Google Scholar
MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676–703. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.676 Google Scholar
Miller, G. A., & Isard, S. (1964). Free recall of self-embedded English sentences. Information and Control, 7, 292–303. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0019-9958(64)90310-9 Google Scholar
Nicenboim, B., Vasishth, S., Gattei, C, Sigman, M., & Kliegl, R. (2015). Working memory differences in long-distance dependency resolution. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 312. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00312 Google Scholar
Van Dyke, J. A., & Lewis, R. L. (2003). Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment and repair: A cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalysed ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 285–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00081-0 Google Scholar
Vasishth, S., & Lewis, R. L. (2006). Argument-head distance and processing complexity: Explaining both locality and antilocality effects. Language, 82, 767–794. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2006.0236 Google Scholar
Vigliocco, G., Butterworth, B., & Semenza, C. (1995). Constructing subject–verb agreement in speech: The role of semantic and morphological factors. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 186–215. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1995.1009 Google Scholar
Wagers, M. W., Lau, E. F., & Phillips, C. (2009). Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes. Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 206–237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2009.04.002 Google Scholar
Yamada, Y., & Neville, H. J. (2007). An ERP study of syntactic processing in English and nonsense sentences. Brain Research, 1130, 167–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2006.10.052 Google Scholar
Yngve, V. H. (1960). A model and a hypothesis for language structure. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 104, 444–466.Google Scholar
Zhang, N. (2010). Coordination in Syntax. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar