University of Cologne, Department of German Language and Literature I-Linguistics, Cologne, Germany.
Department of Psychology, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2022 Feb 11;17(2):e0263879. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0263879. eCollection 2022.
In two eye-tracking reading experiments, we used a variant of the filled gap technique to investigate how strong and weak islands are processed on a moment-to-moment basis during comprehension. Experiment 1 provided a conceptual replication of previous studies showing that real time processing is sensitive to strong islands. In the absence of an island, readers experienced processing difficulty when a pronoun appeared in a position of a predicted gap, but this difficulty was absent when the pronoun appeared inside a strong island. Experiment 2 showed an analogous effect for weak islands: a processing cost was seen for a pronoun in the position of a predicted gap in a that-complement clause, but this cost was absent in a matched whether clause, which constitutes a weak island configuration. Overall, our results are compatible with the claim that active dependency formation is suspended, or reduced, in both weak and strong island structures.
在两项眼动阅读实验中，我们使用填充-gap 技术的变体，从实时处理的角度考察了在理解过程中强、弱 island 是如何被加工的。实验 1 对先前研究进行了概念复制，表明实时处理对强 island 敏感。在没有 island 的情况下，当代词出现在预测 gap 的位置时，读者会经历处理困难，但当代词出现在强 island 内部时，这种困难就不存在了。实验 2 对弱 island 也显示了类似的效果：在 that-complement 从句中，代词出现在预测 gap 的位置会产生处理成本，但在匹配的 whether 从句中，这种成本就不存在了，因为 whether 从句构成了弱 island 结构。总的来说，我们的结果与以下主张一致，即在强 island 和弱 island 结构中，主动依存关系的形成被暂停或减少。
