Strong expectations cancel locality effects: evidence from Hindi.
Samar Husain1, Shravan Vasishth2, Narayanan Srinivasan3
1Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany.
Plos One
|July 11, 2014
Summary
Sentence processing involves expectations and memory. Strong expectations override memory limitations, while weak expectations allow memory effects to emerge during sentence comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Incremental sentence processing is influenced by expectation-driven facilitation and locality-driven retrieval difficulty.
- The interaction between expectation and memory during sentence processing remains unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the interplay between expectation strength and memory effects in sentence processing.
- To validate the prediction that dashed expectations increase processing time for rarer structures.
Main Methods:
- A Hindi self-paced reading study was conducted to examine processing difficulty.
- Two experiments manipulated expectation strength (specific verb vs. general part-of-speech) and verb delay.
Main Results:
- Dashed expectations led to longer processing times for rarer structures, supporting expectation-based accounts.
- Strong verb expectations facilitated processing even with delays, overriding locality effects.
- Weak expectations (part-of-speech only) showed a tendency towards locality effects when verbs were delayed.
Conclusions:
- Strong expectations effectively cancel out locality effects in sentence processing.
- Weak expectations permit locality effects to emerge, highlighting the nuanced interaction between expectation and memory.
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