The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses
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Gibson_The syntactic.pdf
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1.53 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Levy, Roger
Fedorenko, Evelina
Gibson, Edward A.
Date Issued
June 2013
Journal
Journal of Memory and Language
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Levy, Roger, Evelina Fedorenko, and Edward Gibson. “The Syntactic Complexity of Russian Relative Clauses.” Journal of Memory and Language 69, no. 4 (November 2013): 461–495.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Although syntactic complexity has been investigated across dozens of studies, the available data still greatly underdetermine relevant theories of processing difficulty. Memory-based and expectation-based theories make opposite predictions regarding fine-grained time course of processing difficulty in syntactically constrained contexts, and each class of theory receives support from results on some constructions in some languages. Here we report four self-paced reading experiments on the online comprehension of Russian relative clauses together with related corpus studies, taking advantage of Russian’s flexible word order to disentangle predictions of competing theories. We find support for key predictions of memory-based theories in reading times at RC verbs, and for key predictions of expectation-based theories in processing difficulty at RC-initial accusative noun phrase (NP) objects, which corpus data suggest should be highly unexpected. These results suggest that a complete theory of syntactic complexity must integrate insights from both expectation-based and memory-based theories.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.10.005
