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Meaning through syntax: language comprehension and the reduced relative clause construction
1Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, 43210, USA.
Psychological Review
|July 30, 2003
Summary
This study explains why some reduced relative clauses are hard to understand. Verb meaning incompatibility with reduced relative clauses makes sentences like "The horse raced past the barn fell" unacceptable.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Reduced relative clauses (RRCs) pose comprehension challenges in psycholinguistics.
- Previous explanations for RRC difficulty remain incomplete.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose and test a new explanation for the difficulty of comprehending certain RRCs.
- To investigate the role of verb-specific semantic incompatibility in RRC processing.
Main Methods:
- Corpus analysis of naturally produced sentences to determine the frequency of specific RRC types.
- Psycholinguistic experiments designed to elicit and measure comprehension of problematic RRCs.
- Comparison of RRCs involving verbs like "race" versus other verbs.
Main Results:
- RRCs like "The horse raced past the barn fell" occur with near-zero probability in natural language.
- RRCs with compatible verbs occur with significantly higher probability (approx. 1 in 20).
- Experimental data confirm that semantic incompatibility impedes RRC comprehension.
Conclusions:
- The semantic incompatibility between a verb and its RRC structure is a key factor in comprehension difficulty.
- This finding offers a novel explanation for a long-standing psycholinguistic puzzle.
- The results have implications for theories of sentence processing and language acquisition.