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

clear predictions for head-final RCs.
Chapter 2 Issues in Relative Clause Processing
HG03 LB06 LG07 KV07 QF08
Preference O S O S O (S)
Region
Canonicity
IC
SC+GA
Access.
Expectation
Persp.+ES
Frequency
RC
√
√
√
de N
√
√
√
√
RC
√
√
√
de N
√
√
√
√
RC (de)
√
√
√
√
SC+ES
Experience ( √ ) ( √ ) ( √ )
Table 2.4: Studies of the RC extraction preference in Mandarin and their consistency
with discussed theories. HG03 = Hsiao and Gibson (2003), LB06 = Lin and Bever
(2006a), LG07 = Lin and Garnsey (2007), KV07 = Kuo and Vasishth (2007), and
QF08 = Qiao and Forster (2008). IC = Integration Cost, SC = Storage Cost, GA =
Gap Assumption, and ES = Elided Subject Assumption.
I turn now to the second phenomenon to be addressed in this thesis: Effects of forgetting
while the processing of complex nested structures.
2.5 Forgetting Effects
2.5.1 The Grammaticality Illusion
Complex nested structures like center-embedding relative clauses are very difficult to
process. Grammaticality rating studies show that these structures are often judged as
ungrammatical. Memory-based theories (Gibson, 1998; 2000; Just and Carpenter, 1992;
Lewis and Vasishth, 2005; Lewis et al., 2006) explain this by the excessive capacity load
evoked by a number of unbounded dependencies that have to be held in memory. The
DLT (Gibson, 2000) predicts parsing slow-downs due to storage of complex predictions
and decay processes in distant dependencies. Capacity limitations are commonly seen
as cross-linguistic constraints that underly all sorts of language processing. Hence the
predictions of memory-based theories are language-independent. However, a study by
Vasishth et al. (2008) casts doubt on that claim’s validity. Their experiment suggests
that the robustness of memorized representations and related decay effects may well be
dependent upon language-specific grammatical properties. The experiment concerned
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