Lexical chunking effects in syntactic processing
- Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.
Author: | Arne Zeschel |
---|---|
URN: | urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-37765 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1515/COGL.2008.016 |
ISSN: | 1613-3641 |
Parent Title (English): | Cognitive Linguistics |
Publisher: | de Gruyter |
Place of publication: | Berlin (u.a.) |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of first Publication: | 2008 |
Date of Publication (online): | 2015/06/19 |
Publicationstate: | Veröffentlichungsversion |
Reviewstate: | Peer-Review |
Tag: | Sentence processing; prefabs; usage-based model |
GND Keyword: | Disambiguierung; Englisch; Funktionale Grammatik; Kollokation |
Volume: | 19 |
Issue: | 3 |
First Page: | 427 |
Last Page: | 446 |
Note: | Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively. |
DDC classes: | 400 Sprache / 430 Deutsch |
Open Access?: | ja |
Linguistics-Classification: | Psycholinguistik / Kognitive Linguistik |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 3.0 Deutschland |