Abstract
Expectation-driven facilitation (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and locality-driven retrieval difficulty (Gibson, 1998, 2000; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) are widely recognized to be two critical factors in incremental sentence processing; there is accumulating evidence that both can influence processing difficulty. However, it is unclear whether and how expectations and memory interact. We first confirm a key prediction of the expectation account: a Hindi self-paced reading study shows that when an expectation for an upcoming part of speech is dashed, building a rarer structure consumes more processing time than building a less rare structure. This is a strong validation of the expectation-based account. In a second study, we show that when expectation is strong, i.e., when a particular verb is predicted, strong facilitation effects are seen when the appearance of the verb is delayed; however, when expectation is weak, i.e., when only the part of speech “verb” is predicted but a particular verb is not predicted, the facilitation disappears and a tendency towards a locality effect is seen. The interaction seen between expectation strength and distance shows that strong expectations cancel locality effects, and that weak expectations allow locality effects to emerge.
Highlights
The role of expectations in sentence comprehension has received a great deal of attention in the psycholinguistic literature ever since Levy [1] applied the surprisal proposal of Hale [2] to account for a range of phenomena in the sentence comprehension literature
Experiment 1 shows that a dashed expectation is costly: in subject relatives, we see a slowdown when the relative clause verb is closer to the relative pronoun
The results can be explained by the pre-building of syntactic structure of as yet unseen words based on predictions triggered by the previous context
Summary
The role of expectations in sentence comprehension has received a great deal of attention in the psycholinguistic literature ever since Levy [1] applied the surprisal proposal of Hale [2] to account for a range of phenomena in the sentence comprehension literature ( see [3,4,5]). The expectation based account predicts that in a sentence like The administrator who the nurse met..., when the distance between the argument noun phrase the administrator and a verb met is increased by interposing another relative clause, The administrator who the nurse that was from the clinic met..., the expectation for a verb becomes sharper in the second case, leading to faster reading times at the verb compared to the first sentence. One issue with this account is that it makes the wrong prediction for some cases. We will refer to the decay/ interference accounts as the locality account
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