Forster Kenneth I, Guerrera Christine, Elliot Lisa
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, 85721, Tucson, AZ.
Behav Res Methods. 2009 Feb;41(1):163-171. doi: 10.3758/BRM.41.1.163.
The maze task is an online measure of sentence processing time that provides an alternative to the standard moving window version of self-paced reading. Rather than each word of the sentence being presented in succession, two words are presented at the same time, and the participant must choose which word is a grammatical continuation of the sentence. This procedure forces the reader into an incremental mode of processing in which each word must be fully integrated with the preceding context before the next word can be considered. Previous research with this technique has not considered whether it is sufficiently sensitive to syntactic complexity effects or to garden path effects. Four experiments are reported demonstrating that reliable differences in processing time for subject relatives and object relatives can be obtained, and that this technique generates garden path effects that correspond closely with the data from eyetracking experiments, but without the spillover effects that are sometimes obtained with eyetracking. It is also shown that the task is sensitive to word frequency effects, producing estimates well in excess of those found with eyetracking.
迷宫任务是一种在线测量句子处理时间的方法，它为自定步速阅读的标准移动窗口版本提供了一种替代方案。句子中的单词不是依次呈现，而是同时呈现两个单词，参与者必须选择哪个单词是句子的语法延续。这个过程迫使读者进入一种增量处理模式，即每个单词必须在与前面的语境完全整合之后，才能考虑下一个单词。以前使用这种技术的研究没有考虑它是否对句法复杂性效应或花园路径效应足够敏感。本文报告了四项实验，结果表明，对于主语关系从句和宾语关系从句，可以获得可靠的处理时间差异，并且这种技术产生的花园路径效应与眼动追踪实验的数据密切对应，但没有眼动追踪有时会出现的溢出效应。研究还表明，该任务对词频效应敏感，产生的估计值远超过眼动追踪所发现的估计值。
