Biomedical subjects

Edward Gibson

Publications and source records attributed to Edward Gibson.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

Processing relative clauses in Chinese.

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are more complex than subject-extracted structures. A key word-order difference between Chinese and other Subject-Verb-Object languages is that Chinese relative clauses precede their head nouns. Because of this word order difference, the results follow from a resource-based theory of sentence complexity, according to which there is a storage cost associated with predicting syntactic heads in order to form a grammatical sentence. The results are also consistent with a theory according to which people have less difficulty processing embedded clauses whose word order matches the word order in main clauses. Some corpus analyses of Chinese texts provide results that constrain the classes of possible frequency-based theories. Critically, these results demonstrate that there is nothing intrinsically easy about extracting from subject position: depending on the word order in the main clause and in a relative clause, extraction from object position can be easier to process in some circumstances.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Against repair-based reanalysis in sentence comprehension.

Structural reanalysis is generally assumed to be representation-preserving, whereby the initial analysis is manipulated or repaired to arrive at a new structure. This paper contends that the theoretical and empirical basis for such approaches is weak. A conceptually simpler alternative is that the processor reprocesses (some portion of) the input using just those structure-building operations available in first-pass parsing. This reprocessing is a necessary component of any realistic processing model. By contrast, the structural revisions required for second-pass repair are more powerful than warranted by the abilities of the first-pass parser. This paper also reviews experimental evidence for repair presented by Sturt, Pickering, and Crocker (1999). We demonstrate that the Sturt et. al. findings are consistent with a reprocessing account and present a self-paced reading experiment intended to tease apart the repair and reprocessing accounts. The results support a reprocessing interpretation of Sturt et. al.'s data, rendering a repair-based explanation superfluous.

Cognition↗

PubMed2002

The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity.

This paper reports the results of five experiments designed to investigate the effects of referential processing on sentence complexity. Gibson (Cognition, 68 (1998) 1) suggested that sentence complexity is related to the locality of integrations between dependent syntactic heads, and that an appropriate measure of locality is the number of new discourse referents intervening between the endpoints of those integrations. The experiments in this paper test, modify and extend Gibson's (1998) claims. Each experiment manipulated noun phrases (NPs) in the subject positions of object-extracted relative clauses in order to determine how different types of NPs affected sentence complexity. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 used questionnaires to gauge sentence complexity, whereas Experiments 4 and 5 used self-paced reading. The results from Experiments 1, 2, 4 and 5 suggest that the complexity of the experimental items was more closely related to the Givenness status of the embedded subject in the Givenness Hierarchy than to whether the embedded subject was old or new to the discourse. Experiment 3 compared materials in which a quantifier was rotated through subject positions of a nested relative clause structure. The results of this experiment support a discourse-processing-based distance metric for computing locality and provide evidence against a pure similarity-based account of structural complexity such as proposed by Bever (Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis of linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 279-362). New York: Wiley).

Cognition↗

PubMed2002

Individual differences in sentence memory.

Results from an experiment with two parts are presented in this paper. In part one, participants listened to sentences containing two, three, four, or five clauses, and were asked questions about the content of the sentences. The results of part one demonstrate that an important unit of representation in sentence memory is the clause, and not some other component of discourse structure. In part two, the same group of participants performed eight different short-term storage/working memory tasks. A composite complex span score was computed for each participant based on three working memory tasks closely based on Daneman & Carpenter's (1980) reading span task. This working memory measure was significantly correlated with the participants' performance on the sentence memory task in part one. A second working memory measure--N-back--was also significantly correlated with the participants' performance on the sentence memory task, and there was no correlation between their performance on the complex span task and the N-back task. It is therefore concluded that (i) working memory consists of a number of dissociable components; and (ii) memory for sentences taps into more than one of these working memory components. Furthermore, the high correlations of sentence memory with the complex span and the N-back tasks (neither of which are language processing tasks) suggests that memory for sentences is not simply a result of linguistic experience; rather, it is likely that an independent working memory component contributes to participants' performance on the sentence memory task.

Cognition↗