Understanding the role of referential processing in sentence complexity

Language comprehension requires syntactic, semantic and pragmatic processing. The work presented in this thesis clarifies the role that the resource demands of syntactic and referential processing play in sentence complexity. Results are interpreted within the framework of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998), which provides a hypothesis about how computational resources constrain the process of sentence comprehension. These new results support and further develop the DLT's discourse-based distance metric for computing locality. The experiments presented here were designed to investigate the referential processing load imposed by relating noun phrase (NP) anaphors to their antecedents and to discover the ramifications of increased referential processing load on behavioral measures of language comprehension. Four questionnaire experiments tested the intuitive complexity of doubly nested sentences containing NPs that were differently referentially accessible. These experiments demonstrated that sentences with structural dependencies crossing less accessible referents are judged more difficult than sentences with structural dependencies crossing more accessible referents. They also showed that referential accessibility manipulations had a negligible effect on intuitive complexity in positions that did not interrupt long distance structural dependencies.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Warren, Tessa Cartwright, 1974-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Edward A.F. Gibson.

• Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8187

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8187