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

1.3 Psycholinguistic Aspects
parser has to re-transform it into the canonical order. This extra processing makes
non-canonical structures harder to comprehend than sentences mirroring the underlying
order. Supported by evidence from Ferreira (2003), this theory extends to thematic roles,
which seem to be assigned by using heuristics based on a canonical argument structure.
A fully heuristic language processing account has been proposed by Bever (1970). He
defined several comprehension strategies that relied on superficial structural similarities.
One of them (Strategy D) was related to thematic role assignment:
Strategy D “Any Noun-Verb-Noun (NVN) sequence within a potential internal unit in
the surface structure corresponds to ‘actor-action-object’.” (Bever, 1970)
Bever’s strategies cover several categorial levels of structural regularities reaching from
phonemes to complex phrases and clauses. These strategies define specific structures that
seem to appear in a regular fashion at different levels as basic or canonical structures
that are predicted or expected by default. Concerning processing difficulty, this account
would predict harder processing for structures that do not fit into the strategy templates.
Canonicity accounts are closely related to structural frequency. Although it is not obligatory,
most accounts that use heuristics base their choice of canonical structures on the
frequencies of those in language usage. The original language classification by Greenberg
into SOV, SVO, etc., was clearly attributed to often occurring thematic orderings.
On the other hand, a theory assuming base-generated orderings in deep structure of a
generative grammar can, of course, argue completely independent of frequencies and, for
instance, refer to universal grammar specifications. Of course, Bever’s strategic preferences,
although apparently correlating with frequent structures, could also be claimed
to stem from innate universal principles that help children learn a language. Detailed
predictions of a word order canonicity account will be discussed in 2.3.
1.3.4 Experience
Experience-based theories assume that parsing strategies and processing efficiency are
shaped by exposure to language.
Structural Frequency
Literature shows that corpus frequencies can be a good predictor for comprehension difficulty.
A consequent assumption is that structures that are used more often should be
easier to comprehend than structures that are rarely produced. This assumption proposes
a parallelism between language production and comprehension. There are roughly
two possibilities to explain that parallelism. One explanation states a casual relation
between production and comprehension, meaning that exposure to special structures
shapes the comprehension ability of those. The other explanation assumes that the underlying
processes of production and comprehension are basically the same and hence
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