Premium
Reading‐Time Evidence for Intermediate Linguistic Structure in Long‐Distance Dependencies
Author(s) -
Gibson Edward,
Warren Tessa
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
syntax
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.587
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9612
pISSN - 1368-0005
DOI - 10.1111/j.1368-0005.2004.00065.x
Subject(s) - nominalization , linguistics , verb , reading (process) , computer science , sentence , dependency (uml) , non finite clause , dependent clause , natural language processing , mathematics , artificial intelligence , noun , philosophy
. Most linguistic theories since Chomsky (1973) have hypothesized that long‐distance dependencies crossing multiple clauses are mediated by intermediate structures. This paper provides a new source of evidence for the existence of such intermediate structures: reading times during online sentence comprehension. The experiment presented here compares reading times for two structures involving the long‐distance extraction of a wh ‐filler: (a) a structure in which a clause intervenes between the endpoints of the extraction, and (b) a structure in which a nominalization of the clause intervenes. The logic of the experiment relies on two hypotheses: first, that intermediate structures mediate the relationship between a wh ‐filler and its θ ‐role‐assigning verb when a clause intervenes between them but not when a nominalization intervenes; and second, that reading times for a word increase as linear distance increases between the word and the position on which it is dependent in the partial structure for the input (Gibson 1998, 2000; Grodner, Watson & Gibson 2000). In combination, these hypotheses predict that reading times at the region in which the verb assigns a θ ‐role to the wh ‐filler will be faster in the clausal conditions than in the nominalized conditions, because in the clausal conditions intermediate structure mediate the wh ‐filler verb dependency and cause it to be more local. This prediction was confirmed.