Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago.
Cogn Sci. 2024 Sep;48(9):e13497. doi: 10.1111/cogs.13497.
While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive relative clauses (RRCs) and appositive relative clauses (ARCs) in American English. In three self-paced reading experiments, we examined whether both RRCs and ARCs interfere with the matrix clause content and give rise to the agreement attraction effect. While the standard attraction effect was consistently observed in the baseline RRC structures, the effect varied in the ARC structures. These results collectively suggest that discourse structure indeed constrains syntactic dependency resolution. Most importantly, we argue that what is at stake is not the static discourse structure properties at the global sentence level. Instead, attention should be given to the incremental update of the discourse structure in terms of which discourse questions are active at any given moment of a discourse. The current findings have implications for understanding the way discourse structure, specifically the active state of discourse questions, constrains memory retrieval.
虽然句子理解领域的大量研究探讨了不同类型的语言信息如何用于指导句法分析，但对于语篇结构的影响知之甚少。本研究探讨了这个问题，重点关注美国英语中限制性关系从句 (RRC) 和同位关系从句 (ARC) 之间的区别所表现出的主要和次要语篇对比。在三个自定步速阅读实验中，我们考察了 RRC 和 ARC 是否都会干扰主句内容并产生一致吸引效应。虽然标准吸引效应在基线 RRC 结构中始终得到观察，但在 ARC 结构中效应有所不同。这些结果共同表明，语篇结构确实限制了句法依存关系的解析。最重要的是，我们认为，关键问题不是全局句子层面上静态的语篇结构属性。相反，应该关注语篇结构的增量更新，即任何给定语篇时刻的活动语篇问题。当前的研究结果对于理解语篇结构（特别是语篇问题的活跃状态）如何限制记忆检索具有重要意义。
