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Processing Italian relative clauses: working memory span and word order effects on RTs
Alberto Di Domenico1, Rosalia Di Matteo
1Department of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Psychology, University of Chieti, Via dei Vestini 31, 66013 Chieti, Italy. alberto.didomenico@unich.it
The Journal of General Psychology
|December 1, 2009
Summary
Parsing strategies, not just memory load, explain why object sentences are harder to understand than subject sentences. Individual working memory capacity significantly impacts comprehension of complex sentence structures.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
- Linguistics
Background:
- Subject-object asymmetry in relative clause comprehension is a known phenomenon.
- Explanations include parsing strategies (Active Filler Theory) and working memory load.
- Italian's flexible word order provides a unique context to study this.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether parsing strategies or memory load drives the subject-object asymmetry in relative clause comprehension.
- To examine the role of individual differences in working memory span on processing relative clauses in Italian.
- To test the predictions of the Active Filler Theory.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments were conducted using Italian relative clauses.
- Reading times were measured to assess comprehension difficulty.
- Participants were divided into low-span and high-span working memory groups.
Main Results:
- Object extraction was more complex than subject extraction in canonical sentences (Experiment 1).
- Low-span individuals struggled more with object relative clauses.
- Uncanonical subject-relative clauses were harder than object-relative clauses, with low-span participants showing greater difficulty (Experiment 2).
Conclusions:
- The findings support the Active Filler Theory, suggesting parsing strategies play a key role.
- Working memory capacity significantly influences the comprehension of complex sentence structures.
- Language structure and individual cognitive abilities interact in sentence processing.
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