Frank Stefan L, Trompenaars Thijs, Vasishth Shravan
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen.
Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam.
Cogn Sci. 2016 Apr;40(3):554-78. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12247. Epub 2015 May 6.
An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect.
一个省略了中间动词的英语双重嵌入关系从句通常比其语法对应形式更容易被处理，这一现象被称为语法错觉。研究发现，这种效应在德语中是相反的，这表明这种错觉是特定于语言的，而不是普遍工作记忆限制的结果。我们展示了三个自定步速阅读实验的结果，这些结果表明，以荷兰语为母语的人在阅读荷兰语句子时也不会表现出语法错觉，而以德语和荷兰语为母语的人在阅读英语句子时都会表现出这种错觉。这些发现为反对将工作记忆限制作为对英语中观察到的效应的解释提供了证据。我们基于所涉及语言的统计模式提出了另一种解释。为支持这一替代解释，一个在荷兰语和英语句子上都进行训练的单一循环神经网络模型被证明能够预测语法效应中的跨语言差异。
