Connectionist Modeling of Experience-based Effects in Sentence ...

1.2 Relative Clauses and Complexity
and individual differences in the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses.
The aim of the work at hand is to assess this model’s predictions on two related phenomena
that are most probably the result of language-specific experience: the subject/object
difference in Chinese Mandarin and the forgetting effect in multiply embedded object
relative clauses in English and German.
S/O Difference in Mandarin Studies on Mandarin relative clauses are inconclusive
regarding the preferred extraction. While all other languages investigated in that matter
show a subject preference, Mandarin is a potential candidate for an exception from that
global consistency. This is also what is claimed to be predicted by MC02’s account for
structural regularity (Hsiao and Gibson, 2003; Kuo and Vasishth, 2007).
Forgetting Effect The forgetting effect refers to a grammaticality illusion of ungrammatical
center-embedding that is present in English but not in German. Grammatical
differences between German and English here also suggest an explanation based on experience
with structural regularities.
In the remaining of this chapter the syntactic properties of relative clauses will briefly
be introduced. Then four relevant explanatory aspects of psycholinguistic models, will
be discussed: memory, expectation, canonicity, and experience. Chapter 2 will lay out
the two issues of the subject/object difference in Mandarin and the forgetting effect in
English and German, and discuss potential explanations. Chapter 3 will then explain the
properties of simple recurrent networks and discuss MC02’s account in detail. Finally, in
chapter 4 SRNs will be used to simulate the two issues addressed here and the resulting
predictions will be discussed.
1.2 Relative Clauses and Complexity
The focus of the work at hand are NP-modifying restrictive relative clauses (RCs) like
those shown in example (1). The embedded RC misses an NP, here represented by
ei, which transformational syntax theories interpret as an unpronounced trace of an
extraction movement (e.g. Chomsky, 1981). The trace appears either in subject or
object position in the embedded clause and is co-indexed with the relative pronoun that,
which binds it to the preceding head noun. The position of the trace depends on the
extraction type of the RC. In a subject-extracted relative clause (subject relative
clause, subject relative, or SRC) like in (1a) the embedded subject reporter is extracted
as the subject of the main clause. In an object-extracted relative clause (object
relative clause, object relative, or ORC) like (1b) the extracted element served as object
of the embedded clause and subject of the matrix clause. Hence, in the ORC the noun
reporter fulfills two roles.
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