COMPREHENDING SENTENCES WITH LONG-DISTANCE DEPENDENCIES

为了理解这句话“那个被老师强迫说话的女孩抱怨了谁” 必须确定“女孩”应被视为缺失的主题。 动词“Talk”和“Who”是介词“to”的缺失宾语。 “那个女孩”和“那个女孩”之间存在远距离依存关系的句子 “说”之前的主体地位对“说”的理论提出了特殊的问题 句子理解能力。他们挑战了人类在短期内的明显极限 记忆和处理能力，在任意数量的语言材料中 可以在相互依赖的项和任何一个项之间进行干预 句子可以包含多个远程依赖项。更进一步说，他们是 受制于语言使用者必须遵守的独特语言限制。我们 提出实验研究远距离句子的理解 依从性、用反应时间等衡量加工难度。 我们的目标是确定人们遵循的决策原则 理解这样的句子，以识别各种类型的信息 (词汇的、语用的、超段的、语法的)他们用来制造 有关远程依赖关系的决定，并指定 它们使用不同功能类型的信息。

To understand the sentence "Who did the girl the teacher forced to talk complain to?" One must determine that "the girl" is to be taken as the missing subject of the verb "talk" and that "who" is the missing object of the preposition "to." Sentences with such long-distance dependencies as that between "the girl" and the subject position preceding "to talk" pose special problems for theories of sentence comprehension. They challenge the apparent human limits on short-term memory and processing capacity, in that arbitrary amounts of linguistic material can intervene between the items that are dependent upon each other and any one sentence can contain several long-distance dependencies. Further, they are subject to unique linguistic constraints that a language user must honor. We propose experiments to study the comprehension of sentences with long-distance dependencies, using reaction time and other measures of processing difficulty. Our goals are to determine what decision principles people follow in understanding such sentences, to identify the various types of information (lexical, pragmatic, suprasegmental, grammatical constraints) they use in making decisions about long-distance dependencies, and to specify the sequence in which they use functionally different types of information.