Abstract
The present response time study investigated how a hypothesized time-based working memory constraint of 2–3 s affects the resolution of grammatical and semantic dependencies. Congruent and incongruent object relative (OR) and subject relative sentences were read at different presentation rates so that the distance between dependent words was either shorter or longer than 2–3 s. Incongruent OR sentences showed an effect of presentation rate. Experiment 1 focused on grammatical dependencies. Processing of adjectives with agreement features mismatching those of the preceding dependent word showed rapid agreement resolution at a time-interval below 2 s. Dependency intervals over 3 s reflected a different, more time-consuming process possibly due to extended search in sentence semantic representations as the grammatical form of the first word in the dependency fades away. In experiment 2, focusing on semantic dependencies, incongruent OR sentences displayed a different pattern: a gradual increase in processing time as a function of distance between dependent words. Thus, the 2–3 s long time-window seems to constrain the maintenance of grammatical forms in working memory.
Highlights
It is a well-established finding that sentences containing object relative (OR) clauses are generally more difficult to comprehend than corresponding sentences containing subject relative (SR) clauses (Gordon et al 2001, 2004; King and Just 1991; Kwon et al 2013; Schriefers et al 1995; Traxler et al 2002)
In the ANOVAs conducted on the response time data, presentation rate had an effect on the response times (RTs) of ungrammatical OR sentences, where fast presentation yielded enhanced processing speed at fast rate as compared to both medium and slow (Fig. 1)
The results indicate that time constraints affect working memory load during sentence processing
Summary
It is a well-established finding that sentences containing object relative (OR) clauses are generally more difficult to comprehend than corresponding sentences containing subject relative (SR) clauses (Gordon et al 2001, 2004; King and Just 1991; Kwon et al 2013; Schriefers et al 1995; Traxler et al 2002). After reading a disagreeing adjective, decision times could be thought to reflect the latency of the agreement dependency-resolution process triggered by the suffix expressing number This process would be expected to involve a search in short-term memory for an appropriate grammatical form that the adjective could agree with, i.e. an NP with singular or plural marking. The semantic congruency task was predicted to produce different response time patterns than the syntactic task involving decisions on agreement relations: instead of indicating a sharp dividing line between results at fast presentation rate on the one hand and medium and slow rates on the other hand, response latencies in the semantic congruency task might reflect either a more gradual change as the temporal distance between the dependent words increases and word meaning representations fade or no measurable effect of presentation rate if word meaning representations are maintained, at least to some degree, in sentence meaning representations
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