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Nest Building Behavior as an Early Indicator of Behavioral Deficits in Mice
Published on: October 19, 2019
An on-line study of Japanese nesting complexity
Kentaro Nakatani1, Edward Gibson
1Department of English and American Literature and Language, Konan University Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cognitive Science
|May 14, 2011
Summary
People read more complex sentence structures slower, with processing difficulty emerging early in nested syntax. This finding supports expectation-based theories over retrieval-based ones for syntactic complexity.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Syntactic complexity influences language processing.
- Existing theories include retrieval-based and expectation-based accounts.
- Understanding the cognitive mechanisms of syntactic processing is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the processing of syntactic complexity in Japanese.
- To differentiate between retrieval-based and expectation-based accounts of syntactic complexity.
- To identify the locus of processing slowdown in nested structures.
Main Methods:
- A self-paced reading experiment was conducted in Japanese.
- Participants read sentences with four levels of increasing syntactic nesting.
- Reading times for different sentence structures were recorded and analyzed.
Main Results:
- Reading times increased with greater syntactic nesting.
- The slowdown in processing occurred early within the nested structures.
- No significant slowdown was observed when processing verbs at the end of clauses.
Conclusions:
- The findings do not support retrieval-based integration accounts of syntactic complexity.
- Results align with expectation-based accounts of syntactic complexity.
- Processing difficulty in nested structures is likely driven by predictive mechanisms.
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