Incremental interpretation and discourse complexity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0031/000031Abstract
We will present two self-paced reading studies that provide new evidence on the incrementality of semantic interpretation, in particular with regard to the notion of discourse complexity as introduced by Gibson's distance-based dependency locality theory (DLT; cf. Gibson, 1998, 2000). More specifically, we will focus on the con-tribution of referential processing on sentence complexity. The experiments com-pared the processing of simple definite DPs like der Lehrer ('the teacher') and com-plex DPs containing a possessive NP like Peters Lehrer ('Peter's teacher'). While simple DPs introduce only a single discourse referent, complex DPs introduce two discourse referents and some relation between them. This additional processing ef-fort is reflected by increased reading times.
References
Bader, M. and Häussler, J. 2005. World-Knowledge and Frequency in Resolving Number Ambiguities. Presented at the 11th Annual Conference on Architecture and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Ghent, Belgium.
Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68, 1-75
Gibson, E. 2000. The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Marantz, A., Miyashita, Y. and O’Neil, W. (eds.) 2000, Image, language, brain. Papers from the first Mind Articulation Project Symposium, 95-126. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Warren, T. and Gibson, E. 2002. The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity. Cognition 85, 79-112.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Jana Häussler (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
