Maintenance cost in the processing of subject-verb dependencies
Data
2022Egilea
Ristic, Bojana
Mancini, Simona
Molinaro, Nicola
Staub, Adrian
Ristic B, Mancini S, Molinaro N, Staub A. Maintenance cost in the processing of subject-verb dependencies. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2022 Jun;48(6):829-838. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000863. Epub 2021 Feb 4. PMID: 33539169.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Laburpena
Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies
involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of
long-distance subject–verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed
results using self-paced reading or phoneme-monitoring tasks. In the current study, we used eye tracking
during reading to test whether maintaining a long-distance SV dependency results in a processing cost
on an intervening adverbial clause. In Experiment 1, we studied this question in Spanish and found that both
go-past reading times and regressions out of an adverbial clause to the previous regions were significantly
increased when the clause interrupts a SV dependency compared to when the same clause doesn’t interrupt
this dependency. We then replicated these findings in English (Experiment 2), observing significantly
increased go-past reading times on a clause interrupting a SV dependency. The current study provides the first
eye-tracking data showing a maintenance cost in the processing of SV dependencies cross-linguistically.
Sentence comprehension models should account for the maintenance cost generated by SV dependency
processing, and future research should focus on the nature of the maintained representation.