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

Chapter 2 Issues in Relative Clause Processing
140 MARCEL ADAM JUST AND PATRICIA A. CARPENTER
fc
o
H
03
Subject Relative
I I I I
[The] reporter senator admitted the
that error,
attacked
the
SIMULATION
Object Relative
a- B
I I I
[The] reporter attacked admitted the
that error,
the
senator
Figure 2.4: CC-READER simulation HUMAN results DATA on English subject and object extracted
relative clauses (figure from Just and Carpenter, 1992; p. 140).
Subject Relative
Object Relative
900
Lowa
ever, in Mandarin both assumptions would most likely result in the same predictions.
Assuming800 possible elided subjects in a main clause, both a main P'' clause and an embedded
Low
RC could be expected in either construction. Thus the mere frequency High of subject versus
OH 700
object Ed extractions could indeed be decisive in this case, predicting a subject preference.
On the other 600 hand, an overt subject gap in the SRC as assumed in the gap assumption
would olower
the cost at the relativizer for the SRC. Due to the main clause ambiguity
2
in the R ORC 500 a costly Highupdate
of the plausibility ranking would happen at the relativizer
where, ORC becomes more 1 j_ likely i than I a main clause. This cost is lower I I I in the subject
extraction[The] duereporter to thesenator higheradmitted rankingthe of an embedded [The] reporter SRC. attacked Consequently, admitted theunder
the Gap
Assumption W athat syntactic expectationerror, theory wouldthat also predict a subject error. preference.
S
attacked
the
2.3.3 Canonicity
the
senator
Figure 9. The number of cycles expended on various parts of the subject-relative sentences (on the left)
and object-relative sentences (on the right) when the simulation, CC READER, is operating with more or
less working memory capacity. (The bottom graph presents the human data for comparison with the
simulation.)
Considering Greenberg’s classification as a basis, what would a canonical word order account
predict for English and German relative clauses? English subject relative clauses
exhibit the canonical SVO structure whereas object relatives use an OSV ordering.
Therefore, a heuristic or base-generative canonicity theory would assign a higher pro-
Pragmatic Influence on Syntactic Processing
cessing cost to ORCs in English, which is consistent with empirical evidence. The same
applies for German, agreeing on the widely accepted SOV classification. As illustrated in
example (13) German SRCs have SOV ordering and would be preferred, whereas ORCs
have an OSV ordering. If we considered an SVO basis, no clear predictions would be
low span simulation, which has a smaller activation maximum.
The words that follow the verbs evoke fewer productions, so
even though the activation maximum applies during their firing,
they complete their execution in a smaller number of cycles
(compared with the verb processing), and the high-low difference
becomes smaller.
In summary possible. a simulation that varies the amount of activation
available for simultaneously computing and mnintatMng
information accounts for the reading time differences between
high and low span subjects dealing with syntactic complexity
provided by center-embedded clauses.
The simulation demonstrates how the contribution of a pragmatic
cue to syntactic aaatyas depends on an adequate supply
of activation. Fust consider the simaJation of the high span
subjects (in which the activation maximum is relatively high) in
processing the sentences containing reduced relative clauses.
The inanimacy information encoded with the subject noun
"evidence") is still in an activated state whea the verb is
being processed, and this information is used to select between
the two interpretations of the verb (past tense vs. past partici-
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