PubMed · 11197434
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S J Ellis, C Matthews, S J Weatherby. 2001-01-13. Informed consent is flawed.. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(05)71193-4
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In studies of language, it is widely accepted that the form of a word is independent of its meaning and syntactic category. Thus, the relationship between phonological form and grammatical class would not be expected to affect reading time. However, Farmer et al. have now shown that the phonological typicality of a noun or verb influences how rapidly it is read. This finding has implications for both sentence processing and the interpretation of fixation patterns in reading.
Gibson's Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) [Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76; Gibson, E. 2000. The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O'Neil (Eds.), Image, Language, Brain (pp. 95-126). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] proposes that the processing complexity of a sentence is related to the length of its syntactic dependencies: longer dependencies are more difficult to process. The DLT is supported by a variety of phenomena in language comprehension. This raises the question: Does language production reflect a preference for shorter dependencies as well? I examine this question in a corpus study of written English, using the Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn Treebank. The DLT makes a number of predictions regarding the length of constituents in different contexts; these predictions were tested in a series of statistical tests. A number of findings support the theory: the greater length of subject noun phrases in inverted versus uninverted quotation constructions, the greater length of direct-object versus subject NPs, the greater length of postmodifying versus premodifying adverbial clauses, the greater length of relative-clause subjects within direct-object NPs versus subject NPs, the tendency towards "short-long" ordering of postmodifying adjuncts and coordinated conjuncts, and the shorter length of subject NPs (but not direct-object NPs) in clauses with premodifying adjuncts versus those without.
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