Assessing Intervention Effects in Sentence Processing: Object Relatives vs. Subject Control.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Syntactic Processing
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Object relative clauses are known to be more difficult to process than subject relative clauses.
• This complexity is often explained by intervention effects within frameworks like Generalized Minimality.
• The role of movement in syntactic structures, particularly control constructions, is a subject of ongoing debate.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the processing of object relatives with subject control structures in ditransitive verbs.
• To test whether intervention effects, as proposed by Generalized Minimality, explain the processing difficulty of object relatives.
• To investigate the influence of general cognitive factors on processing complexity in syntactic dependencies.

Main Methods:

• A self-paced reading task with a moving-window display was used with 69 adult Portuguese speakers.
• Participants read sentences across four conditions: Subject Relatives, Object Relatives, Subject Control, and Object Control.
• Supplementary tasks measured resistance to interference, lexical knowledge, working memory capacity, and lexical access ability.

Main Results:

• Object relatives were significantly harder to process than subject relatives.
• Processing difficulty for subject control was not significantly different from object control, contradicting movement-based accounts of control.
• Object relative clause complexity effects interacted with Reading Span (working memory) for response times, but not for accuracy or reading times.

Conclusions:

• The findings challenge recent movement-based analyses of control constructions.
• The results support the Generalized Minimality framework's explanation of intervention effects in object relatives.
• Working memory capacity (Reading Span) plays a role in processing object relative clauses, suggesting non-modular aspects of syntactic processing.