Reading morphologically complex clause structures in Finnish

Abstract

The study examined how morphologically complex clause constructions were processed during reading Finnish. Readers’ eye e xation patterns were recorded when they read two alternative versions of the same linguistic construction, a morphologically complex converb construction and its less complex subclause counterpart. The complexity of the converb construction is apparent in the construction being marked by less perceivable bound morphemes, which make the clause subject and predicate morphologically more complex and more dense in information. Experiment 1 showed that more complex converb constructions produced longer gaze durations than the length- and frequency-matched subclause constructions. Experiment 2 showed that the complexity eVect is reversed when the more complex clause form was clearly more common in the language than its less complex counterpart. It is concluded that both structural complexity and structural frequency ine uence the ease with which linguistic expressions are processed during reading. In his state-of-the-art review of human syntactic parsing, Mitchell (1994) concludes that the recent psycholinguistic research on parsing has been heavily preoccupied with (1) parsing of syntactically ambiguous materials (such as reduced relative clauses in English), (2) nonlinguistic issues, such as serial versus parallel nature and time constraints of on-line parsing, and (3) parsing of a single language, English. Thus, as suggestions for future directions, Mitchell (1994) calls for studies that examine parsing of unambiguous linguistic structures in languages most distantly related to English.