Empirical Investigations of Locality Effects in Linguistic Complexity

本研究的目的是探讨人类句子加工机制与可用计算资源之间的关系。提出了一种以方位为主要概念的新理论：句法预测方位理论(SPLT)。该理论有两个组成部分：整合部分和记忆成本部分：？整合资源是将生词与当前句法和语篇结构联系起来所需要的资源。这包括主位角色分配和匹配句法类别预测。有人提出，较长距离的积分比较短距离的积分更昂贵，因此也更耗时。？根据该理论的记忆资源成分，需要记忆资源来维持对每个句法类别的预测，这些句法类别需要将输入的字符串作为一个语法句子来完成。建议保持预测类别所需的存储资源随着距离的增加而增加。这项研究由三组自定节奏的阅读实验组成，这些实验解决了对Splt和其他语言理解理论的一些预测。前两组实验测试了英语中Splt的预测，第三组实验通过在句法结构与英语：日语有很大不同的语言中测试该理论来探索Splt的跨语言共性。

The goal of this research is to investigate the relationship between the human sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. A promising new theory of this relationship is proposed whose main notion is locality: the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT). There are two components to the theory: an integration component and a memory cost component: ª Integration resources are required to link new words into current syntactic and discourse structures. This includes thematic role assignment and matching syntactic category predictions. It is proposed that longer distance integrations are more costly and hence more time consuming than shorter distance integrations. ª According to the memory resource component of the theory, memory resources are required to maintain the prediction of each syntactic category that is needed to complete the input string as a grammatical sentence. It is proposed that the memory resources required to retain a predicted category increase over distance. The research consists of three sets of self paced reading experiments that address a number of predictions of the SPLT and other theories of language comprehension. The first two sets of experiments test predictions of the SPLT in English, and the third set of experiments explores the cross linguistic generality of the SPLT by testing the theory in a language with very different syntactic structure from English: Japanese.