Abstract
Many studies have recently shown that comprehenders can anticipate upcoming information on the basis of only part of a sentence. However, all experimental evidence to date has only dealt with the prediction of grammatical heads and their complements. Here, we address the question of whether people also predict modifiers, syntactically non-obligatory elements. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether the processing of a post-nominal relative clause is facilitated when it can be predicted. The results showed some evidence for prediction of the modifiers, which is consistent with a surprisal-based view of processing complexity (Hale, 2001), but not with Gibson's (1998) notion of prediction memory cost, which only applies to heads.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 67-72 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | IEICE technical report. Speech |
Volume | 109 |
Issue number | 140 |
Publication status | Published - 11 Jul 2009 |