Dillon Brian, Chow Wing-Yee, Wagers Matthew, Guo Taomei, Liu Fengqin, Phillips Colin
Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA.
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Donostia - San Sebastián, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2014 Sep 24;5:1025. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01025. eCollection 2014.
The present study examined the processing of the Mandarin Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji to evaluate the role that syntactic structure plays in the memory retrieval operations that support sentence comprehension. Using the multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (MR-SAT) paradigm, we measured the speed with which comprehenders retrieve an antecedent for ziji. Our experimental materials contrasted sentences where ziji's antecedent was in the local clause with sentences where ziji's antecedent was in a distant clause. Time course results from MR-SAT suggest that ziji dependencies with syntactically distant antecedents are slower to process than syntactically local dependencies. To aid in interpreting the SAT data, we present a formal model of the antecedent retrieval process, and derive quantitative predictions about the time course of antecedent retrieval. The modeling results support the Local Search hypothesis: during syntactic retrieval, comprehenders initially limit memory search to the local syntactic domain. We argue that Local Search hypothesis has important implications for theories of locality effects in sentence comprehension. In particular, our results suggest that not all locality effects may be reduced to the effects of temporal decay and retrieval interference.
本研究考察了汉语远距离反身代词“自己”的加工过程，以评估句法结构在支持句子理解的记忆检索操作中所起的作用。我们使用多反应速度-准确性权衡（MR-SAT）范式，测量了理解者检索“自己”的先行词的速度。我们的实验材料对比了“自己”的先行词在小句内的句子和“自己”的先行词在远距离小句的句子。MR-SAT的时间进程结果表明，与句法上的局部依存关系相比，具有句法上远距离先行词的“自己”依存关系的加工速度较慢。为了帮助解释SAT数据，我们提出了一个先行词检索过程的形式模型，并得出了关于先行词检索时间进程的定量预测。建模结果支持局部搜索假设：在句法检索过程中，理解者最初将记忆搜索限制在局部句法域内。我们认为局部搜索假设对句子理解中的局部性效应理论具有重要意义。特别是，我们的结果表明，并非所有的局部性效应都可以归结为时间衰减和检索干扰的效应。
