In this presentation, I will present evidence from my lab which evaluates distance-based theories of language comprehension. In the process of understanding a sentence, it is necessary to integrate structures for incoming words into the structure(s) that have been built thus far, such that the potential integrations for an incoming word are determined by the syntactic rules for the language. According to one current theory --- the dependency locality theory (DLT, Gibson, 1998, 2000) --- the processing cost of integrating a new word w is proportional to the distance between w and the syntactic head to which w is being integrated. Structural integration cost has been shown to be an important factor in accounting for on-line processing load. The first set of experiments that I will present provide evidence for distance-based complexity from reading time studies of a range of English sentence types. The second set of experiments investigates the question of how distance is quantified. Our evidence suggests that the discourse accessibility of the intervening elements may be a large component of the distance computation. The final experiments to be discussed investigate the neural basis of syntactic integration difficulty, using event-related potentials (ERPs).

References:

• Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76.
• Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Miyashita, Y., Marantz, A., & O'Neil, W. (Eds.), Image, language, brain (pp. 95-126), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Kaan, E., Harris, A., Gibson, E. & Holcomb, P. (2000). The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 159-201.