Institute of Quantitative Linguistics, Beijing Language and Culture University, No.15 Xueyuan Road, Beijing, CN-100083, China.
Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, No. 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2022 Oct;51(5):1043-1062. doi: 10.1007/s10936-022-09878-4. Epub 2022 Apr 29.
We conducted a broad-coverage investigation of the effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing against a dependency-annotated reading time corpus of English. A combined method of quantitative syntax and psycholinguistic analyses was adopted to yield converging evidence. It was found that (i) head-initial structures allow greater structural complexity, i.e., larger head-dependent distance, than head-final structures in both language comprehension and production; (ii) within the capacity limit of working memory, syntactic distance is a positive predictor of reading time for a word with a preceding head, whereas a negative predictor of reading time for a word with a following head; and (iii) at the sentence level, syntactic distance is a significant predictor of sentence reading time. These results suggest that (i) different word orders may enjoy different processing mechanisms in terms of cognitive difficulty and processes, which can be explained by an incremental language parser; and (ii) in addition to distance, word order should also be considered as a factor affecting language processing, which is an important extension to distance-based language processing models. Taken as a whole, our study paves the way for corpus-based integration of quantitative linguistic and psycholinguistic methods into understanding language processing and its underlying cognitive mechanisms.
我们对句法距离和词序对英语依存标注阅读时间语料库中语言处理的影响进行了广泛的研究。采用了定量句法和心理语言学分析相结合的方法，得出了相互印证的证据。结果发现：（i）在语言理解和产生中，头先行结构比头尾结构允许更大的结构复杂性，即更大的头依赖距离；（ii）在工作记忆的容量限制内，对于有前导词的词，句法距离是阅读时间的正预测因子，而对于有后续词的词，句法距离是阅读时间的负预测因子；（iii）在句子层面上，句法距离是句子阅读时间的显著预测因子。这些结果表明：（i）不同的词序可能在认知难度和过程方面具有不同的处理机制，可以用增量语言解析器来解释；（ii）除了距离之外，词序也应该被视为影响语言处理的因素之一，这是对基于距离的语言处理模型的重要扩展。总的来说，我们的研究为基于语料库的定量语言学和心理语言学方法的整合铺平了道路，有助于理解语言处理及其潜在的认知机制。
