THE POSITION EFFECT ON PROCESSING NOMINAL CLAUSES: EVIDENCE ON A TRANSLATION TASK
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46827/ejfl.v0i0.1870Cuvinte cheie:
cognitive steps, subject nominal clause, object nominal clauses, sentence processingRezumat
There have been accounts on why processing object relative clauses is more difficult than processing subject relative clauses. One account attributes the difficulty to the increase of working memory load, another to the roles of sentential subject plays, still another to the differences in perspective consistency. The present study is intent on probing the effect of different serial orders (position factor) in processing two different types of nominal clauses to check whether serial model for processing sentences also fit with other accounts mentioned above. The primary assumption of this study is that there is more processing difficulty in nominal clause as subject than as object based on the number of operational cognitive steps involved. The research question is: Are Subject nominal clauses more difficult than Object ones in the course of processing? A total of 30 participants were recruited to do the translation work on English sentences with either Subject or Object nominal clauses, the performance of which will be measured by the time spent (seconds). The results indicate that time spent on Subject nominal clauses are significantly longer than Object ones. Thus, the assumption that the number of operational steps involved can be a criterion to measure difficulty level of sentence parsing.
Article visualizations:
Referințe
Caplan, D., & Waters, G.S.(1999). Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22,77-126.
Crain, S., & Steedman, M. (1985). On not being led up the garden path: The use of context by the psychological parser. I D. Dowty, L. Karttunnen, & A. Zwicky (Eds.), Natural language parsing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Ford, M. (1983). A Method for obtaining measures of local parsing complexity throughout sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 203-218.
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 6, 291-325.
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76.
Guay, Ching-chung. (2000). The macrocosm of English grammar. Chapter 19,119-124.
Guay, Ching-chung. (In process). An English-Chinese Translation Model on Syntactic Differences with its Research Implications.
Hopp, H. (2014). Working memory effects in the L2 processing of ambiguous relative clauses. Language Acquisition, 21, 250–278.
Hopp, H. (2015). Individual differences in the second language processing of object-subject ambiguities. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36, 129–173.
Hung S.-M., & Hsieh P.-J. (2015). Syntactic processing in the absence of awareness and semantics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41, 1376–1384. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000094
Izumi, Shinichi. (2003). Processing Difficulty in Comprehension and Production of Relative Clauses by Learners of English as a Second Language. Language Learning 53:2, 285-323.
Jacob, G., & Felser, C. (2016). Reanalysis and semantic persistence in native and non-native garden-path recovery. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 907–925.
Keenan, E., & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and Universal Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 63-99.
MacDonald, M.C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M.S. (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703.
MacWhinney, B., & Pleh, C. (1988). The processing of restrictive relative clauses in Hungarian. Cognition, 29, 95-141.
Millis, K. K., & Just, M. A. (1994). The Influence of Connectives on Sentence Comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 33, 128-147.
Miller, A. (2014). Accessing and maintaining referent in L2 processing of wh-dependencies. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4, 167–191.
Miller, A. (2015). Intermediate traces and intermediate learners: Evidence for the use of intermediate traces during sentence processing in second language French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 37, 487–516.
Novick, J., Hussey, E., Teubner-Rhodes, S., Harbison, I., & Bunting, M. (2014). Clearing the garden-path: Improving sentence processing through cognitive control training. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29, 186–217.
Pan, H., Schimke, S., & Felser, C. (2015). Referential context effects in non-native relative clause ambiguity resolution. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19, 298–313.
Pozzan, L., & Trueswell, J. (2016). Second language processing and revision of garden-path sentences: a visualworld study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19, 636–643.
Sedivy, J. (2002). Invoking Discourse-Based Contrast Sets and Resolving Syntactic Ambiguities. Journal and Memory and Language, 46, 341-370.,
Sheldon, A. (1974). On the role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 272-281.
Traxler, M. J., Morris, R. K., & Seely, R. E. (2002) Processing Subject and Object Relative Clauses: Evidence from Eye Movements. Journal of Memory and Language 47, 69-90.
Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Kello, C. (1993). Verb specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 528-553.
Witzel, J., Witzel, N., & Nicol, J. (2012). Deeper than shallow: Evidence for structure-based parsing biases in second language sentence processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33, 419–456.
Descărcări
Publicat
Număr
Secțiune
Licență
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
