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

2.1 The Subject/Object Difference
130 MARCEL ADAM JUST AND PATRICIA A. CARPENTER
I
Q
O
W
S
H
O 25
S
H
05
900
800
700
600
500
Mid
High
Subject Relative
Low
I I I
[The] reporter senator admitted the
that
attacked
the
error,
Object Relative
J_ I I I
[The] reporter attacked admitted the
that error,
the
senator
Figure 2. Reading time per word for successive areas of subject- and object-relative sentences, for high,
medium (Mid), and low span subjects. (The differences among the span groups are larger for the more
difficult object-relative construction, which is the more complex sentence. The differences are particularly
large at the verbs, which are points of processing difficulty that are expected to stress working
memory capacity. The reading times for parenthesized words are not included in the plotted points.)
Figure 2.1: Reading times for English relative clauses by reading span value (low,
middle and high) (King and Just, 1991).
lated decline no in reading the ability time to imitate difference sentences on is largest the main in casesverbbiguities.
causedA by comprehender extractionencountering type. Also, an ambiguity there was might
in which an the extraction processing of the type main × syntactic verb (emb/matrix) constituent is interaction. select a single interpretation In particular, (Frazier, the1978; reading Just & times Carpenter,
interrupted onby the embedded processing of a and long the embedded mainconstituent. verb yielded1987; theMarcus, pattern 1980), V or she or he might retain two alternative
emb. < V main in the SRC and
This type of construction requires that the initial portion of the interpretations until some later disambiguating information is
main constituent the opposite be retained (V main in working < V emb) memory in the while ORC. the provided (Gorrell, 1987; Kurtzman, 1985). These two schemes
embedded constituent is processed under the memory load, for dealing with syntactic ambiguity have been posed as oppos-
and then the (7) stored English portion SRC must be and made ORC accessible (King again and Just, ing (and 1991): mutually exclusive) alternatives. However, in a series of
when its final portion is being processed. In addition to this experiments, we found that both positions could be reconciled
a. The reporter thati ei attacked the senator admitted the error. (SRC)
age-related difference in imitation performance, Kemper by postulating individual differences in the degree to which
found a corresponding b. age-related The reporter difference thati in spontaneous the senatormultiple attacked representations ei admitted are maintained the error. for a (ORC) syntactic ambigu-
production (Kemper, 1988; Kynette & Kemper, 1986).
ity (MacDonald, Just, & Carpenter, in press).
Thus, the (8) decline German in language SRC performance and ORC in the (Konieczny elderly is and In the Ruh, model 2003): we advance, multiple representations are ini-
focused on sentences a. whose Dersyntax
Wärter, makes deri
large demands ei denon
Häftling tially constructed beleidigte, by all entdeckte comprehenders denon
Tunnel. first encountering
working memory. In general, the individual operations of lan- the syntactic ambiguity. Each of the multiple representations is
guage processing show little The evidence guard, of decline whonom with age theacc when prisoner assumed insulted, to have an activation discovered level the proportional tunnel. to its fre-
the total processing load ‘The is small. guard However, whoat insulted times of high the prisoner quency, its discovered syntactic complexity, the tunnel.’ and its (SRC) pragmatic plausibility.
demand, the total performance does decline, indicating an age- The important new postulate of our theory is that the working
related decrease in the b. overall Der Wärter, working memory deni capacity der for Häftling memory ei capacity beleidigte, of the comprehender entdeckte influences den Tunnel. the duration
language. The guard, whoacc thenom prisoner (i.e, intervening insulted, text) over discovered
which multiple the syntactic tunnel. representations
can be maintained. A low span reader does not have suffi-
‘The guard who the prisoner insulted
Syntactic Ambiguity: Single Versus Multiple
cient capacity discovered to maintain the the tunnel.’ two interpretations, (ORC) and soon
abandons the less preferred interpretation, which results in a
Representations
Similar results concerning the subject/object single-interpretation differencescheme. were obtained In contrast, a inhigh German, span reader
Another French, facet of language Hindi, Japanese, that could generate Korean demand and for others,
will
involving
be able to maintain
different
two
sorts
interpretations
of paradigms
for some
like
period.
additional resources is syntactic ambiguity, particularly in the The full set of results is too long to present here, because it
absence of eye-tracking, a preceding context self-paced that selects reading, among the and possible brain imaging includes reading technics times (see and table comprehension 2.1 for references). rates on unam-
interpretations. Explanations If comprehenders for the were processing to represent more differences than biguous between sentences the two and two types resolutions of RCs of ambiguous must ideally sentences
one interpretation of an ambiguity during the portion of a sen- (MacDonakl, Just, & Carpenter, in press, for details). However,
tence that is ambiguous, this would clearly demand additional we can present the critical data that support the central claim,
capacity. However, the existing data and the corresponding the- which makes an unintuitive prediction. In the survey of capacories
are in disagreement about the processing of syntactic amity effects presented above, a greater capacity produces better
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