Abstract
In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the processing of the nominal control construction. Participants’ eye-movements were monitored while they read sentences that included either giver control nominals (e.g. promise in Luke’s promise to Sophia to photograph himself) or recipient control nominals (e.g. plea in Luke’s plea to Sophia to photograph herself). In order to examine both the initial access of control information, and its later use in on-line processing, we combined a manipulation of nominal control with a gender match/mismatch paradigm. Results showed that there was evidence of processing difficulty for giver control sentences (relative to recipient control sentences) at the point where the control dependency was initially created, suggesting that control information was accessed during the early parsing stages. This effect is attributed to a recency preference in the formation of control dependencies; the parser prefers to assign a recent antecedent to PRO. In addition, readers slowed down after reading a reflexive pronoun that mismatched with the gender of the antecedent indicated by the control nominal (e.g. Luke’s promise to Sophia to photograph herself). The mismatch cost suggests that control information of the nominal control construction was used to constrain dependency formation involving a controller, PRO and a reflexive, confirming the use of control information in on-line interpretation.
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Notes
The control and recency effects were visible at the critical positions in First pass, Regression-path, and Total time in Experiment 1, and in Regression-path, Total reading, and Second pass time in Experiment 2 in Betancort et al. (2006). Thus although the effects were slightly delayed in Experiment 2, the effects are overall clearly visible in early measures of both experiments.
Note that there is no inconsistency between the NP1 control noun preference found by Kwon and Sturt (2014) and the NP2 recency preference predicted in the present study. This is because, in the present study, both NP1 and NP2 precede the infinitival verb, so a recency strategy can lead to a preference for NP2 as an antecedent of PRO. In Kwon and Sturt’s study, in contrast, only one NP precedes the infinitival verb, so a recency preference cannot apply (see Example 5 above). Instead, the preference in that study is likely to be due to the cost of maintaining a temporarily unassigned antecedent for PRO, as discussed above.
See also Sturt and Kwon (2015) for a similar gender mismatch design, which, however, investigated only NP1 control.
Although the first appearance of the mismatch effect was obtained as early as the spill-over region, some other studies examining reflexive-antecedent dependencies have found earlier effects in First-pass measures on the reflexive itself (e.g. Sturt 2003). We suggest that this variability in timing may be partly due to factors that influence the degree of memory interference during retrieval of the antecedent (see Sturt and Kwon 2015).
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Dr. Hui Fang for assistance in stimuli generation and Meredith Englund, Caitlin Richter and Lewis White for assistance in data collection. This research was supported by the faculty research fund of Konkuk University in 2014.
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Kwon, N., Sturt, P. Processing Control Information in a Nominal Control Construction: An Eye-Tracking Study. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 779–793 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9374-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9374-2