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

Chapter 2
Issues in Relative Clause Processing
2.1 The Subject/Object Difference
One of the issues that shall be addressed in this work is the processing difference between
subject and object relatives. The subject/object difference is phenomenon excessively
discussed in the literature. Studies in many languages show that subject relatives are
easier to comprehend than object relatives (see table 2.1 for an overview). The studies
are cross-linguistically consistent enough to speak of a universal subject preference.
An exemplary study of English RCs that will be of further relevance for the work at
hand is King and Just (1991). For that reason I will briefly describe their experiment:
King and Just (1991) King and Just conducted a self-paced reading 1 study of English
RCs like in example (1), repeated here as (7). Before the experiment the participants
were grouped by their reading span value obtained by a reading span test
(Daneman and Carpenter, 1980). The span value is assumed to be associated with the
individual memory capacity. The test value was used to group participants into high-,
mid-, and low-span readers. Reading time analysis yielded the following results: there
was a) a global memory span effect showing increased reading times for participants
with lower span value, b) the memory span effect was increased on the ORC, c) regions
of greatest difficulty were the embedded verb (attacked) and the main verb (admitted),
and d) the ORC was globally read slower than the SRC. The results showed that readers
spent more time on the embedded and the main verb in object relative clauses compared
to subject relative clauses. Additional comprehension questions yielded a significantly
lower accuracy for low-spans compared to high-spans, showing that not only processing
was slower but also comprehension was worse for participants with lower span value.
Note that the high extraction type difference on the main verb may be a spillover effect.
Grodner and Gibson (2005) carried out a study that used stimuli with intervening
material between the verbs to prevent spillover. This study showed that there is indeed
1 Self-paced reading (Just et al., 1982) is a method to record word-by-word reading time in online
sentence comprehension. Participants read a sentences word-by-word pressing a button to make the
next word appear. Only the current word is shown. The rest of the sentence may optionally be
represented by masking characters.
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