Processing object relative clauses: Discourse or frequency?
Douglas Roland, Carolyn O'Meara, Hongoak Yun, & Gail Mauner (University at Buffalo)
[email protected] While object relative clauses (1) are generally more difficult to process than subject relative clauses (2), a variety of factors such as the pronominal status and givenness of the embedded NP have been shown to reduce or eliminate this difficulty (e.g., Gordon et al., 2001; Reali & Christiansen, in press; Warren & Gibson, 2002). We argue that this reduction in difficulty is not the result of the pronominal status of the embedded NP per se, but is the result of changes in the relationship between the object relatives and the larger discourse context in which they appear. In normal language use, object relatives tend to be used to ground the modified NP in the discourse context, while subject relatives are more likely to be used for other purposes (Fox & Thompson, 1990). Thus, (2) would be likely to occur whether or not the banker had been mentioned already, while (1) would be likely to occur only if the banker had been the discourse topic. Potentially, when processing a sentence such as (1) in isolation, the comprehender would need to create a scenario in which the banker was the discourse topic. Previous experiments with object relatives and pronouns have either provided a preceding referent for 3rd person pronouns – providing the needed discourse topic – or have used ‘generic’ pronouns (e.g., you, I, everyone) where a referent could easily be imagined, thus avoiding the unnaturalness found in using object relatives like (1) in isolation. If discourse factors rather than pronominal status or frequency factors were responsible for previous results, the difficulty of object relative clauses with full NPs should be reduced when they are embedded in an appropriate discourse context. A participant-paced moving window paradigm was used to examine the influence of discourse context on the processing of relative clauses. Preceding context sentences either provided a discourse context where the embedded NP of the relative clause was the topic (e.g., 3), or was related to the target sentence, but did not topicalize the embedded NP (e.g., 4). For the region containing the embedded NP and relative clause verb – the same region where Reali and Christiansen observed faster reading times for pronominal embedded NPs – we found that when an appropriate discourse context was provided, object relatives with full NPs were read as quickly as subject relatives. However, we also found that, regardless of discourse context, the main clause verb was read more slowly for object relatives than subject relatives. By comparison, Reali and Christiansen observed non-significantly longer reading times at the main clause verb following pronominal object relatives. While providing an appropriate discourse context did not completely eliminate processing difficulties associated with object relatives, given the reading time results at the main verb, it did eliminate previously observed processing differences between subject and object relatives in the relative clause itself. Thus, our results suggest that the pronominal object relative effect may be due, in part, to the better fit between the typical discourse use of object relatives and experimental contexts in which they appeared. (1) The lady that the banker visited enjoyed the dinner very much. (2) The lady that visited the banker enjoyed the dinner very much. (3) The banker was very friendly. The lady that … (4) There was a dinner party on Saturday night. The lady that … References: Fox, B. A. and Thompson, S. A. (1990). A discourse explanation of the grammar of relative clauses in English conversation. Language, 66(2), 297–316. Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., and Johnson, M. (2001). Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27(6), 1411-1423. Reali, F. and Christiansen, M. H. (in press). Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence. Journal of Memory and Language. Warren, T. and Gibson, E. (2002). The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity. Cognition, 85, 79-112.
