Working Memory and Relative Clause Attachment under Increased Sentence Complexity

1. Working Memory and Relative Clause Attachment under Increased Sentence Complexity Akira Omaki Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa 1. Introduction 3. Experiment 1 • (1) Someone shot… • …the servant of the actress [who was on the balcony]. • (N1)(N2)(RC) • Cross-linguistic differences in RC attachment preferences: • Local Attachment (LA) • English, Arabic, Norwegian, Romanian, Croatian, etc. • Non-local Attachment (NLA) • Spanish, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Greek, Russian etc. • Various Accounts for the cross-linguistic differences: • Implicit Prosody (Fodor, 2002) • Construal Theory (Frazier & Clifton, 1996) • Tuning Hypothesis (Mitchell et al., 1995) • Attachment Binding (Hemforth et al., 1998) • HOWEVER… • Offline experimentsby… • Mendelsohn & Pearlmutter (1999): English object-modifying RC + Reading Span Test • Swets, Desmet, Hambrick & Ferreira (2004): Subject modifying RC in English (LA preference) and Dutch (NLA preference) + Reading Span Test • Their Findings: •  Very surprising, in that various locality principles are supposed to minimize processing burden (e.g., Late Closure (Frazier, 1987), Recency (Gibson et al., 1996)) Method Results Relative Clause Attachment • Participants: 36 English native speakers • Materials: 32 target items (4) + 75 fillers • (4a) Embedded Condition (EC) •  More complex (Storage cost at “who” = 4) • [The babysitter [that the sister of the schoolgirl who burned herself the other day adored]] was very nice. • (4b) Sentence-complement Condition (SC) •  Less complex (Storage cost at “who” = 2) • The babysitter said [that the sister of the schoolgirl who burned herself the other day was very nice.] • Example Question: • Who got burned the other day? 1. the sister 2. the schoolgirl • Procedure • A.Offline reading experimenton computer • 1. Read the whole sentence on a computer screen • 2. then press the space bar to show the question • B. Reading Span Test: A version of Waters & Caplan’s (1996) • Acceptability judgment + Recall Task • Score 1 was added when both judgment and recall were • correct (Max score: 70) Local Attachment Non-local Attachment • Significant negative correlation btw. RST scores and NLA responses • 2-tailed correlation in… • EC condition: r = - .482 (p<.001) SC condition: r = - .561 (p<.001) •  The greater RS leads to an LA preference. (Replicates previous findings) • No significant difference between EC & SC condition • (Correlation between EC and SC condition was over .90) • Weak trend for a local attachment preference • Mean NLA responses in… • EC condition: 42.19% (SD=27.60) SC condition: 46.35% (SD=28.48) Individual differences in RC attachment preferences? Working Memory Capacity Question: Why the lack of sentence complexity effect? A. Problems with the methodology? They may not have read the whole sentence, since one can answer the question by just looking at the relevant RC attachment region  Addressed in Experiment 2, word-by-word self-paced reading task The greater WM capacity leads to an LA preference (i.e., Low-spans prefer NLA, High-spans prefer LA) 4. Experiment 2 (in progress) Method Preliminary RT Results • Main effect of complexity (F1&F2) in ‘of’ ‘schoolgirl’ ‘who’ burned’  Reflects the storage cost (Gibson, 2000) • Main effect of complexity in ‘was’ (F1&F2)  Reflects the integration cost (Gibson, 2000) • Main effect of attachment (though only F1) in ‘himself/herself’  LA attachment preference, regardless of the sentence complexity • No main effect of interaction in any of the regions (F1&F2) • Participants:32 English native speakers • Materials: 32 target items (5) + 73 fillers • Procedure: Self-paced reading + RST from Exp 1 2. Goal of the Present Study (5a, c) Complex/Non-complex, forced LA The babysitter (said) that the brother of the schoolgirl who burned herself the other day adored was very nice. (5b, d) Complex/Non-complex, forced NLA The babysitter (said) that the brother of the schoolgirl who burned himselfthe other day was very nice. To further examine whether WM capacity interacts with the RC attachment ambiguity in off-line processing (Exp 1 ) and on-line processing (Exp 2) by investigating… (a) whether high-spans and low-spans differ in RC attachment preferences (as in previous studies), and (b) whether the sentence complexity (i.e., the amount of memory cost) interacts with RC attachment preferences (cf. Eastwick & Phillips, 1999) Storage cost LA preference Integration cost High vs. Low: Between-subjects • Mean RST score (n = 32): 45.9, thus 46 as cut-off •  16 low-spans, 16 high-spans •  Complexity (2) x attachment (2) x span size (2) design • High-spans generally slower • Integration, but NOT attachment, interacts with span size 5. Summary Regions with main effect of span size: ‘himself/herself’ and ‘was’ • The general LA preference was observed in offline and online processing • RS significantly correlated with RC attachment ONLY in offline processing. In Exp 2,RS significantly interacted with integration cost, but not with attachment (cf. Caplan & Waters, 1999) – this suggests that (at least) initial RC attachment preference is not influenced at all by memory capacity. Main Effect: RST p<.05, Attach p=.053 No interaction Main Effect: RST p<.01, Complex p<.0005 Complx*RST p<.05 6. Acknowledgement • I thank Matt Prior, Amy J. Schafer, Barbara Schulz, and Bonnie D. Schwartz for their help at various stages. I also thank the snack-eaters at the Psycholinguistics 3ji-no Oyatsu meetings. • This research was partially supported by Elizabeth Holmes-Carr Scholarship, received with much appreciation.