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Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension: Processing Hindi Center Embeddings

Vasishth, Shravan

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2002, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Linguistics.
I used acceptability rating tasks and self-paced reading studies to investigate three working memory-based theories' predictions regarding sentence processing difficulty in Hindi center-embedding constructions: Hawkins' Early Immediate Constituents (EIC), Gibson's Discourse Locality Theory (DLT), and Lewis' Retrieval Interference Theory (RIT). Two main issues were investigated: (a) the effect of definiteness marking on direct objects; and (b) the effect of increasing head-dependent distance. First, definite-marked direct objects were found to be harder to process than bare (indefinite) direct objects, contra EIC, and contra DLT. I argue that, due to discourse constraints, indefinites are harder to process when they are in subject position, whereas definites are harder to process in the direct-object position. Second, regarding distance between heads and dependents, distance was manipulated in two distinct ways: (a) by fronting indirect objects, and by fronting direct objects in center embeddings like ‘siitaa-ne hari-ko kitaab khariid-neko kahaa’, “Sita told Hari to buy a book” ; and (b) by inserting an adverb between the final NP and the innermost verb in canonical order center embeddings. One finding was that if distance is increased between heads and dependents by reordering the dependents ((a) above), processing becomes more difficult, as predicted by EIC and DLT, and contra RIT. However, processing is, suprisingly, easier when distance is increased between the head and its dependents by inserting an adverb between them ((b) above). This goes against EIC, DLT, and RIT's predictions. I explain these results as follows: fronting indirect or direct objects renders them more similar to subjects (since fronted objects are in a typical subject position), causing increased similarity-based interference between the actual subject and the fronted object; by contrast, the easier processing due to adverb insertion occurs because the adverb strengthens the activation level of the current hypothesis (in working memory) regarding the sentence completion. In sum, EIC, DLT, and RIT are only partly able to correctly characterize important cross-linguistic aspects of human sentence parsing. This incomplete coverage of the empirical results motivates a new, more general model of human sentence parsing that correctly accounts for reading-time and acceptability rating data from four languages.
Shari Speer (Advisor)
252 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Vasishth, S. (2002). Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension: Processing Hindi Center Embeddings [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1023402958

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Vasishth, Shravan. Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension: Processing Hindi Center Embeddings. 2002. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1023402958.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Vasishth, Shravan. "Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension: Processing Hindi Center Embeddings." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1023402958

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)