TY  - GEN
A1  - Haendler, Yair
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
A1  - Adani, Flavia
T1  - Discourse accessibility constraints in children´s processing of object relative clauses
N2  - Children’s poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms. We conducted a visual-world study designed to test the off-line comprehension and on-line processing of object relatives in German-speaking 5-year-olds. Children were tested on three types of object relatives, all having a full DP head noun and differing with respect to the type of nominal phrase that appeared in the embedded subject position: another full DP, a 1st- or a 3rd-person pronoun. Grammatical skills and memory capacity were also assessed in order to see whether and how they affect children’s performance. Most accurately processed were object relatives with 1st-person pronoun, independently of children’s language and memory skills. Performance on object relatives with two full DPs was overall more accurate than on object relatives with 3rd-person pronoun. In the former condition, children with stronger grammatical skills accurately processed the structure and their memory abilities determined how fast they were; in the latter condition, children only processed accurately the structure if they were strong both in their grammatical skills and in their memory capacity. The results are discussed in the light of accounts that predict different pronoun effects like the ones we find, which depend on the referential properties of the pronouns. We then discuss which role language and memory abilities might have in processing object relatives with various embedded nominal phrases.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 279 
KW  - child language
KW  - relative clauses
KW  - discourse
KW  - pronouns
KW  - intervention locality
KW  - visual-world paradigm
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-78694
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Nicenboim, Bruno
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Gattei, Carolina
A1  - Sigman, Mariano
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
T1  - Working memory differences in long-distance dependency resolution
N2  - There is a wealth of evidence showing that increasing the distance between an argument and its head leads to more processing effort, namely, locality effects; these are usually associated with constraints in working memory (DLT: Gibson, 2000; activation-based model: Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). In SOV languages, however, the opposite effect has been found: antilocality (see discussion in Levy et al., 2013). Antilocality effects can be explained by the expectation-based approach as proposed by Levy (2008) or by the activation-based model of sentence processing as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth (2005). We report an eye-tracking and a self-paced reading study with sentences in Spanish together with measures of individual differences to examine the distinction between expectation- and memory-based accounts, and within memory-based accounts the further distinction between DLT and the activation-based model. The experiments show that (i) antilocality effects as predicted by the expectation account appear only for high-capacity readers; (ii) increasing dependency length by interposing material that modifies the head of the dependency (the verb) produces stronger facilitation than increasing dependency length with material that does not modify the head; this is in agreement with the activation-based model but not with the expectation account; and (iii) a possible outcome of memory load on low-capacity readers is the increase in regressive saccades (locality effects as predicted by memory-based accounts) or, surprisingly, a speedup in the self-paced reading task; the latter consistent with good-enough parsing (Ferreira et al., 2002). In sum, the study suggests that individual differences in working memory capacity play a role in dependency resolution, and that some of the aspects of dependency resolution can be best explained with the activation-based model together with a prediction component.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 273 
KW  - locality
KW  - antilocality
KW  - working memory capacity
KW  - individual differences
KW  - Spanish
KW  - activation
KW  - DLT
KW  - expectation
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-75694
ER  -