Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence

By Florencia Reali, Morten H. Christiansen. 2007

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We conducted a large-scale corpus analysis indicating that pronominal object relative clauses are significantly more frequent than pronominal subject relative clauses when the embedded pronoun is personal. This difference was reversed when impersonal pronouns constituted the embedded noun phrase. This pattern of distribution provides a suitable framework for testing the role of experience in sentence processing: if frequency of exposure influences processing difficulty, highly frequent pronominal object relatives should be easier to process but only when a personal pronoun is in the embedded position. We tested this hypothesis experimentally: We conducted four self-paced reading tasks, which indicated that differences in pronominal object/subject relative processing mirrored the pattern of distribution revealed by the corpus analysis. We discuss the results in the light of current theories of sentence comprehension. We conclude that object relative processing is facilitated by frequency of the embedded clause, and, more generally, that statistical information should be taken into account by theories of relative clause processing.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d8238059a8e5781984f43442d533e26580968e0

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Language as shaped by the brain. (2008, background): “…(e.g., Tanenhaus et al. 1995), the sound properties of individual words (Farmer et al. 2006), the processing difficulty of an utterance as well as how such difficulty may be affected by prior experience (e.g., Reali & Christiansen 2007), and various pragmatic factors (e.g., Fitneva & Spivey 2004).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “…larger multiword units, as evidenced by recent studies showing sensitivity to multiword sequences in online processing (e.g., Arnon & Snider 2010; Reali & Christiansen 2007b; Siyanova-Chanturia et al. 2011; Tremblay & Baayen 2010; Tremblay et al. 2011), and subsequently further integrated with…”
Rapid Expectation Adaptation during Syntactic Comprehension (2013, background): “But despite work on adaptation across linguistic domains, and explicit suggestions by some language researchers that lifelong learning (adaptation) is a general property of the systems underlying language processing [23,24,46,48,72,124], researchers across linguistic domains have often explored thes”
Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses (2007, methodology): “Our data show that when children are tested on object relatives that they most often say and hear, this subject/object asymmetry disappears, just as in studies of adult sentence processing (Mak, Vonk, & Schriefers, 2002 , 2006 ; Reali & Christiansen, in press ).”
More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases (2010, background): “Also, object relative clauses are processed faster when the embedded clause consists of a frequent subject–verb combination (Reali & Christiansen, 2007).”
Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar: Experimental and corpus-based perspectives (2015, unknown): “Similar effects are reported in other domains of syntax, such as noun phrase conjunction (Desmet & Gibson, 2003) and relative clause attachment (Desmet, De Baecke, Drieghe, Brysbaert, & Vonk, 2006; Reali & Christiansen, 2007).”