Brian Dillon will be giving the linguistics colloquium at Yale tomorrow, Monday October 28. A title and abstract follow.
Colloquium to be given at Yale Linguistics, 10/28, 4pm:
Memory search in syntactic comprehension
One widely observed finding about syntactic comprehension is that the construction of syntactic dependencies is subject to locality effects: shorter syntactic dependencies are easier to process, and preferred over longer ones in cases of ambiguity (Bartek, Lewis, Vasishth & Mason, 2011; Frazier, 1978; Gibson, 1998; Grodner & Gibson, 2005; Kimball, 1973; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; a.o.). A number of theories have proposed to capture these findings as a consequence of the memory architecture of the parser. Recently, theories in this tradition have highlighted the role for temporal decay (Gibson, 1998; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; McElree, Foraker & Dyer, 2003) and similarity-based interference (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Van Dyke & McElree, 2006). In this talk I defend the hypothesis that locality effects in syntactic comprehension cannot be entirely reduced to the effects of decay and interference. I argue instead that locality effects reflect a memory search procedure that prioritizes the retrieval of dependents within a local syntactic domain. I support this hypothesis by investigating the time course of antecedent retrieval for long-distance reflexives in Mandarin Chinese. Data from a speed accuracy trade-off experiment show that local antecedents are retrieved more quickly than non-local antecedents. A computational model of these data points to a role for a local search procedure when retrieving an antecedent for a reflexive. Taken together, these findings support the view that locality effects in processing reflect a syntactically-guided memory search.