Empirical Investigations of Locality Effects in Linguistic Complexity

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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.