On the Shallow Processing (Dis)Advantage: Grammar and Economy.

Arnout Koornneef,Eric Reuland

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00082

Abstract

In the psycholinguistic literature it has been proposed that readers and listeners often adopt a “good-enough” processing strategy in which a “shallow” representation of an utterance driven by (top-down) extra-grammatical processes has a processing advantage over a “deep” (bottom-up) grammatically-driven representation of that same utterance. In the current contribution we claim, both on theoretical and experimental grounds, that this proposal is overly simplistic. Most importantly, in the domain of anaphora there is now an accumulating body of evidence showing that the anaphoric dependencies between (reflexive) pronominals and their antecedents are subject to an economy hierarchy. In this economy hierarchy, deriving anaphoric dependencies by deep—grammatical—operations requires less processing costs than doing so by shallow—extra-grammatical—operations. In addition, in case of ambiguity when both a shallow and a deep derivation are available to the parser, the latter is actually preferred. This, we argue, contradicts the basic assumptions of the shallow–deep dichotomy and, hence, a rethinking of the good-enough processing framework is warranted.

Highlights

The marriage between linguistic theory and experimental psycholinguistics is a tumultuous one
With respect to the goodenough approach (e.g., Ferreira, 2003; Karimi and Ferreira, 2015), the focus of our current contribution, we state that the empirical studies examining bound vs. coreferential dependencies confirm and extend our previous conclusion, where we reported that grammatical operations are less burdensome for the processor than shallower operations
Before we present our final assessment of the good-enough approach in the domain of anaphoric dependencies, we should address some interesting suggestions of Cunnings et al (2014) as to how their results can be related to more general architectural issues

Summary

Introduction

The marriage between linguistic theory and experimental psycholinguistics is a tumultuous one. The tension is nicely shown by the following two quotes on “deep” vs “shallow” processing. (1) Deep processing (our label, borrowed from the literature). “The split between linguistics and psycholinguistics in the 1970’s has been interpreted as being a retreat by linguists from the notion that every operation of the grammar is a mental operation that a speaker must perform in speaking and understanding language. Putting history aside for the moment, we as linguists cannot take the position that there is another way to construct mental representations of sentences other than the machinery of grammar....There is no retreat from the strictest possible interpretation of grammatical operations as the only way to construct linguistic representations.”

Objectives

Conclusion