Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2011 Sep;37(5):1178-98. doi: 10.1037/a0024194.
Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such locality effects are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties and limitations of the short-term memory system that supports comprehension. Despite their theoretical importance and putative ubiquity, however, evidence for on-line locality effects is quite narrow linguistically and methodologically: It is restricted almost exclusively to self-paced reading of complex structures involving a particular class of syntactic relation. We present 4 experiments (2 self-paced reading and 2 eyetracking experiments) that demonstrate locality effects in the course of establishing subject-verb dependencies; locality effects are seen even in materials that can be read quickly and easily. These locality effects are observable in the earliest possible eye-movement measures and are of much shorter duration than previously reported effects. To account for the observed empirical patterns, we outline a processing model of the adaptive control of button pressing and eye movements. This model makes progress toward the goal of eliminating linking assumptions between memory constructs and empirical measures in favor of explicit theories of the coordinated control of motor responses and parsing.
许多理解理论都认为，增加参与语言关系的元素（例如动词和名词短语的论元）之间的距离会增加在线理解过程中建立这种关系的难度。这种局部性效应预计会增加阅读时间，并被认为揭示了支持理解的短期记忆系统的特性和局限性。然而，尽管它们具有理论重要性和普遍存在的可能性，但在线局部性效应的证据在语言和方法上非常有限：它几乎完全局限于涉及特定类别的句法关系的复杂结构的自定步速阅读。我们提出了 4 项实验（2 项自定步速阅读和 2 项眼动实验），证明了在建立主语-动词依存关系过程中的局部性效应；即使在可以快速轻松阅读的材料中，也可以观察到局部性效应。这些局部性效应可以在最早的可能眼动测量中观察到，并且比以前报道的效应持续时间短得多。为了解释观察到的经验模式，我们概述了一个按钮按压和眼球运动自适应控制的处理模型。该模型朝着消除记忆结构和经验测量之间的链接假设的目标迈进，以支持对运动反应和解析的协调控制的明确理论。
