The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Levy, Roger (Author), Fedorenko, Evelina (Contributor), Gibson, Edward A. (Contributor)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier, 2016-05-09T12:31:55Z.
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Online Access:Get fulltext
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100 1 0 |a Levy, Roger  |e author 
100 1 0 |a Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Fedorenko, Evelina  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Gibson, Edward A.  |e contributor 
700 1 0 |a Fedorenko, Evelina  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Gibson, Edward A.  |e author 
245 0 0 |a The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses 
260 |b Elsevier,   |c 2016-05-09T12:31:55Z. 
856 |z Get fulltext  |u http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/102417 
520 |a 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. 
546 |a en_US 
655 7 |a Article 
773 |t Journal of Memory and Language