Strong expectations cancel locality effects: Evidence from Hindi
- Expectation-driven facilitation (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and locality-driven retrieval difficulty (Gibson, 1998, 2000; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are widely recognized to be two critical factors in incremental sentence processing; there is accumulating evidence that both can influence processing difficulty. However, it is unclear whether and how expectations and memory interact. We first confirm a key prediction of the expectation account: a Hindi self-paced reading study shows that when an expectation for an upcoming part of speech is dashed, building a rarer structure consumes more processing time than building a less rare structure. This is a strong validation of the expectation-based account. In a second study, we show that when expectation is strong, i.e., when a particular verb is predicted, strong facilitation effects are seen when the appearance of the verb is delayed; however, when expectation is weak, i.e., when only the part of speech "verb' is predicted but a particular verb is not predicted, the facilitation disappears and aExpectation-driven facilitation (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and locality-driven retrieval difficulty (Gibson, 1998, 2000; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are widely recognized to be two critical factors in incremental sentence processing; there is accumulating evidence that both can influence processing difficulty. However, it is unclear whether and how expectations and memory interact. We first confirm a key prediction of the expectation account: a Hindi self-paced reading study shows that when an expectation for an upcoming part of speech is dashed, building a rarer structure consumes more processing time than building a less rare structure. This is a strong validation of the expectation-based account. In a second study, we show that when expectation is strong, i.e., when a particular verb is predicted, strong facilitation effects are seen when the appearance of the verb is delayed; however, when expectation is weak, i.e., when only the part of speech "verb' is predicted but a particular verb is not predicted, the facilitation disappears and a tendency towards a locality effect is seen. The interaction seen between expectation strength and distance shows that strong expectations cancel locality effects, and that weak expectations allow locality effects to emerge.…
Author details: | Samar Husain, Shravan VasishthORCiDGND, Narayanan Srinivasan |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0100986 |
ISSN: | 1932-6203 |
Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25010700 |
Title of parent work (English): | PLoS one |
Publisher: | PLoS |
Place of publishing: | San Fransisco |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of first publication: | 2014 |
Publication year: | 2014 |
Release date: | 2017/03/27 |
Volume: | 9 |
Issue: | 7 |
Number of pages: | 14 |
Funding institution: | University of Potsdam |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access |
Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |