Syntactic Comprehension of Relative Clauses and Center Embedding Using Pseudowords.

Sun-Young Lee,Hyeon-Ae Jeon,Kyung-Hwan Cheon,Youngjoo Kim,Hee-Dong Yoon,Ki-Chun Nam

doi:10.3390/brainsci10040202

Abstract

Relative clause (RC) formation and center embedding (CE) are two primary syntactic operations fundamental for creating and understanding complex sentences. Ample evidence from previous cross-linguistic studies has revealed several similarities and differences between RC and CE. However, it is not easy to investigate the effect of pure syntactic constraints for RC and CE without the interference of semantic and pragmatic interactions. Here, we show how readers process CE and RC using a self-paced reading task in Korean. More interestingly, we adopted a novel self-paced pseudoword reading task to exploit syntactic operations of the RC and CE, eliminating the semantic and pragmatic interference in sentence comprehension. Our results showed that the main effects of RC and CE conform to previous studies. Furthermore, we found a facilitation effect of sentence comprehension when we combined an RC and CE in a complex sentence. Our study provides a valuable insight into how the purely syntactic processing of RC and CE assists comprehension of complex sentences.

Highlights

Constructing relative clauses (RC) is one of the core processes in complex sentence formation and has been intensely studied in the field of psycholinguistics [1,2,3,4]
Our results showed that the main effects of RC and Center embedding (CE) conform to previous studies
For reading time patterns of CE conditions (RC/CE and NonRC/CE; orange lines in Figure 2), word 2 had the longest reading time compared with the rest, because probabilistic uncertainty was at its peak for word 2 and gradually decreased as other word categories were revealed towards the end of each sentence

Summary

Introduction

Constructing relative clauses (RC) is one of the core processes in complex sentence formation and has been intensely studied in the field of psycholinguistics [1,2,3,4]. The complexity and diversity of RC construction across different natural languages have provoked a plethora of cross-linguistic studies as well as psycholinguistic studies, focusing on a cognitive approach in the hope of building a universal explanation for the various RC structures of different languages. Center embedding (CE), in addition to RC, presents another interesting aspect for understanding and creating complex sentences for parsers. A study of artificial grammar learning [32] proposed that a recursive structure by CE in natural languages is the symbolic computation unique to human language. CE is established by inserting a subordinate clause within a superordinate clause [33]

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion