13.1641, Diss: Cognitive Sci/Psycholing: Vasishth "Working..."

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-13-1641. Mon Jun 10 2002. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 13.1641, Diss: Cognitive Sci/Psycholing: Vasishth "Working..."

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1)
Date:  Fri, 07 Jun 2002 17:39:08 +0000
From:  vasishth at coli.uni-sb.de
Subject:  Cognitive Sci/Psycholing: Vasishth "Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension..."

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Fri, 07 Jun 2002 17:39:08 +0000
From:  vasishth at coli.uni-sb.de
Subject:  Cognitive Sci/Psycholing: Vasishth "Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension..."

New Dissertation Abstract

Institution: Ohio State University
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2002
Author: Shravan  Vasishth
Dissertation Title:
Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension: Processing Hindi Center Embeddings

Dissertation URL: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~vasishth/PhD

Linguistic Field:
Typology, Semantics, Psycholinguistics, Pragmatics, Cognitive Science

Subject Language:
Hindi

Dissertation Director 1: Shari R. Speer
Dissertation Director 2: Richard L. Lewis
Dissertation Director 3: Keith Johnson
Dissertation Director 4: Chris Brew

Dissertation Abstract:
I used acceptability rating tasks and self-paced reading studies to investigate
three working memory-based theories' predictions regarding sentence processing
difficulty in Hindi center-embedding constructions: Hawkins' Early Immediate
Constituents (EIC), Gibson's Discourse Locality Theory (DLT), and Lewis'
Retrieval Interference Theory (RIT).  Two main issues were investigated: (a)
the effect of definiteness marking on direct objects; and (b) the effect of
increasing head-dependent distance.    First, definite-marked direct objects
were found to be harder to process than bare (indefinite) direct objects,
contra EIC, and contra DLT. I argue that, due to discourse constraints,
indefinites are harder to process when they are in subject position, whereas
definites are harder to process in the direct-object position.    Second,
regarding distance between heads and dependents, distance was manipulated in
two distinct ways: (a) by fronting indirect objects, and by fronting direct
objects in center embeddings like `siitaa-ne hari-ko kitaab khariid-neko
kahaa', ``Sita told Hari to buy a book'' ; and (b) by inserting an adverb
between the final NP and the innermost verb in canonical order center
embeddings.    One finding was that if distance is increased between heads
and dependents by reordering the dependents ((a) above), processing becomes
more difficult, as predicted by EIC and DLT, and contra RIT. However,
processing is, suprisingly, easier when distance is increased between the
head and its dependents by inserting an adverb between them ((b) above).
This goes against EIC, DLT, and RIT's predictions. I explain these results
as follows: fronting indirect or direct objects renders them more similar to
subjects (since fronted objects are in a typical subject position), causing
increased similarity-based interference between the actual subject and the
fronted object; by contrast, the easier processing due to adverb insertion
occurs because the adverb strengthens the activation level of the current
hypothesis (in working memory) regarding the sentence completion.    In
sum, EIC, DLT, and RIT are only partly able to correctly characterize
important cross-linguistic aspects of human sentence parsing. This
incomplete coverage of the empirical results motivates a new, more general
model of human sentence parsing that correctly accounts for reading-time
and acceptability rating data from four languages.

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