Maintenance cost in the processing of subject-verb dependencies

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Sentence comprehension models propose maintenance of elements forming long-distance dependencies.
• Research on long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependency maintenance is limited, with mixed findings from previous tasks.
• Previous studies utilized self-paced reading and phoneme-monitoring, lacking direct measures of reading processing costs.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the processing cost associated with maintaining long-distance subject-verb (SV) dependencies.
• To determine if intervening adverbial clauses incur a processing cost when interrupting an SV dependency.
• To provide cross-linguistic evidence using eye-tracking during reading.

Main Methods:

• Utilized eye-tracking during reading to measure processing costs.
• Experiment 1: Examined Spanish sentences with intervening adverbial clauses.
• Experiment 2: Replicated findings in English sentences with intervening adverbial clauses.

Main Results:

• Spanish: Significantly increased go-past reading times and regressions from adverbial clauses interrupting SV dependencies.
• English: Significantly increased go-past reading times on clauses interrupting SV dependencies.
• Cross-linguistic evidence of a maintenance cost in processing long-distance SV dependencies.

Conclusions:

• Eye-tracking data demonstrate a maintenance cost in processing long-distance SV dependencies.
• Sentence comprehension models must incorporate the maintenance cost of SV dependency processing.
• Future research should explore the nature of the representations maintained during dependency processing.