Empirical Investigations of Locality Effects in Linguistic Complexity

本研究的目的是探讨人类句子处理机制与可用计算资源之间的关系。提出了一种新的研究这种关系的理论，其主要思想是局部性：句法预测局部性理论（SPLT）。该理论有两个组成部分：整合部分和记忆成本部分：将新词与当前的句法和语篇结构联系起来需要整合资源。这包括主题角色分配和匹配的句法类别预测。有人提出，较长距离的集成比较短距离的集成更昂贵，因此更耗时。根据该理论的记忆资源部分，需要记忆资源来维持对每个句法类别的预测，这些预测是将输入字符串作为一个语法句子完成所需要的。我们提出，保持预测类别所需的内存资源随着距离的增加而增加。该研究包括三组自定节奏阅读实验，以解决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，第三组实验通过在语法结构与英语截然不同的语言中测试SPLT理论来探索SPLT的跨语言普遍性。

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.