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Published on: September 5, 2019
Understanding sentences with relative clauses.
D T Hakes1, J S Evans, L L Brannon
1University of Texas, 78712, Austin, Texas.
Memory & Cognition
|February 3, 2011
Summary
The interruption hypothesis suggests self-embedded relative clauses are hard to understand. However, experiments show no difference in comprehension difficulty between self-embedded and right-branching clauses.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
- Linguistics
Background:
- Sentences with self-embedded relative clauses are often considered difficult due to interrupting the main clause.
- Previous studies may have confounded clause location (self-embedded vs. right-branching) with internal structure.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the comprehension difficulty of self-embedded relative clauses.
- To isolate the effect of clause embedding location (self-embedded vs. right-branching) from internal clause structure.
Main Methods:
- Experiment I compared comprehension difficulty of self-embedded and right-branching object relative clauses.
- Experiment II compared comprehension difficulty of self-embedded and right-branching subject relative clauses.
- Two measures of comprehension difficulty were used in both experiments.
Main Results:
- Both experiments failed to find significant differences in comprehension difficulty between self-embedded and right-branching relative clauses.
- The results did not support the interruption hypothesis.
Conclusions:
- The location of a relative clause (self-embedded vs. right-branching) does not appear to be the primary factor in comprehension difficulty.
- The interruption hypothesis, as previously tested, is not supported by this research.
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