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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.913-934
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 10 Jul 2023 Revised 31 Aug 2023 Accepted 15 Oct 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202310.913

The Effect of Referential Forms on Incremental Processing of Long-distance Dependencies: Evidence from English Cleft Sentences

Myung Hye Yoo
Postdoctoral Researcher, Dept. of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies. National University of Singapore mhyoo@nus.edu.sg


© 2023 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study examines how the referential form of the noun phrase, intervening the dependency between the filler and gap, modulates the long-distance dependency formation. (e.g., It was the actor who the director graciously thanked before the show). Two theories are evaluated in two self-paced reading tasks: expectation-based and memory-based accounts. The memory-based theories predict later difficulty at the verb (e.g., thanked), whereas the expectation-based process predicts earlier difficulty at the intervenor (e.g., the director). In terms of memory-based theories, this paper explores the reading time at the verb region to determine whether the same referential form of the intervenor with the filler exhibits processing load (similarity-based interference) or whether the parser is sensitive to the gradient status of the intervenor in a discourse within the framework of the dependency locality theory (Givenness Hierarchy). Experiment 1 showed that the verb was read faster with a pronoun intervenor compared to a definite or indefinite intervenor, indicating the binary nature of the Givenness Hierarchy. No interaction between the filler and the intervenor was revealed, indicating no similarity-based interference effects. Experiment 2 confirmed that the insensitivity to different types of full NPs at the verb region cannot be due to contextual support and did not observe similarity effects. Expectation-based processing was also evident at the intervenor region in both Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 1, immediate processing difficulty emerged upon encountering an unexpected referential form. In Experiment 2, processing ease for the intervenor was observed when the previously parsed filler NP led to a strong prediction of the NP type of an intervenor. This study contributes to the growing body of evidence that both memory- and expectation-based processes contribute to the incremental processing of complex sentences involving long-distance dependencies, highlighting distinct processing patterns at different regions.

Keywords:

filler-gap dependencies, referential processing, memory-based parsing, expectation-based parsing, cleft sentences

Acknowledgments

This paper was developed from part of a Ph.D. dissertation by the author.

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