Delgado João, Raposo Ana, Santos Ana Lúcia
Research Center for Psychological Science, Faculdade de Psicologia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, Departmento de Linguística Geral e Românica, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
Front Psychol. 2021 Feb 2;12:610909. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.610909. eCollection 2021.
Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. Under Grillo's (2009) Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality) and the sentence processing system. Specifically, intervention of the subject DP in the movement dependency is expected to generate a minimality violation whenever processing limitations render the moved object underspecified, resulting in compromised comprehension. In the present study, assuming Generalized Minimality, we compared the processing of object relatives with the processing of subject control in ditransitives, which, like object relatives, instantiates a syntactic dependency across an intervening DP. This comparison is justified by the current debate on whether Control should be analyzed as movement: if control involves movement of the controller DP, as proposed by Hornstein (1999), a parallel between the processing of object relatives and subject control in ditransitives may be anticipated on the basis of intervention. In addition, we explored whether general cognitive factors contribute to complexity effects ascribed to movement across a DP. Sixty-nine adult speakers of European Portuguese read sentences and answered comprehension probes in a self-paced reading task with moving-window display, comprising four experimental conditions: ; ; ; . Furthermore, participants performed four supplementary tasks, serving as measures of resistance to interference, lexical knowledge, working memory capacity and lexical access ability. The results from the reading task showed that whereas object relatives were harder to process than subject relatives, subject control was not harder to process than object control, arguing against recent movement accounts of control. Furthermore, we found that whereas object relative complexity effects assessed by response times to comprehension probes interacted with Reading Span, object relative complexity effects assessed by comprehension accuracy and reading times did not interact with any of the supplementary tasks. We discuss these results in light of Generalized Minimality and the hypothesis of modularity in syntactic processing (Caplan and Waters, 1999).
宾语关系从句比主语关系从句更难处理。在格里洛（2009）的广义极小性框架下，宾语关系从句的复杂性效应被解释为干预效应，这是由移动的局部性限制（相对性极小性）与句子处理系统之间的相互作用导致的。具体来说，当处理限制使移位的宾语不明确时，主语限定词短语（DP）在移动依存关系中的干预预计会产生极小性违反，从而导致理解受损。在本研究中，假设广义极小性，我们将宾语关系从句的处理与双及物动词中主语控制结构的处理进行了比较，双及物动词中的主语控制结构与宾语关系从句一样，在一个介入的限定词短语之间实例化了一种句法依存关系。当前关于控制是否应被分析为移动的争论证明了这种比较的合理性：如果控制涉及控制者限定词短语的移动，如霍恩斯坦（1999）所提议的，那么基于干预，可能会预期宾语关系从句的处理与双及物动词中主语控制结构的处理之间存在平行关系。此外，我们探讨了一般认知因素是否对归因于跨越限定词短语的移动的复杂性效应有贡献。69名欧洲葡萄牙语成年母语者在一个带移动窗口显示的自定步速阅读任务中阅读句子并回答理解问题，该任务包括四个实验条件：；；；。此外，参与者执行了四项补充任务，作为抗干扰能力、词汇知识、工作记忆容量和词汇通达能力的测量指标。阅读任务的结果表明，虽然宾语关系从句比主语关系从句更难处理，但主语控制结构并不比宾语控制结构更难处理，这与最近关于控制的移动理论相悖。此外，我们发现，虽然通过对理解问题的反应时间评估的宾语关系从句复杂性效应与阅读广度相互作用，但通过理解准确性和阅读时间评估的宾语关系从句复杂性效应与任何一项补充任务都没有相互作用。我们根据广义极小性和句法处理中的模块性假设（卡普兰和沃特斯，1999）来讨论这些结果。
