TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of Surprisal and Locality on Danish Sentence Processing
T2 - An Eye-tracking Investigation
AU - Balling, Laura Winther
AU - Kizach, Johannes
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - An eye-tracking experiment in Danish investigates two dominant accounts of sentence processing: locality-based theories that predict a processing advantage for sentences where the distance between the major syntactic heads is minimized, and the surprisal theory which predicts that processing time increases with big changes in the relative entropy of possible parses, sometimes leading to anti-locality effects. We consider both lexicalised surprisal, expressed in conditional trigram probabilities, and syntactic surprisal expressed in the manipulation of the expectedness of the second NP in Danish constructions with two postverbal NP-objects. An eye-tracking experiment showed a clear advantage for local syntactic relations, with only a marginal effect of lexicalised surprisal and no effect of syntactic surprisal. We conclude that surprisal has a relatively marginal effect, which may be clearest for verbs in verb-final languages, while locality is a robust predictor of sentence processing. © 2017 Springer Science+Business Media New York
AB - An eye-tracking experiment in Danish investigates two dominant accounts of sentence processing: locality-based theories that predict a processing advantage for sentences where the distance between the major syntactic heads is minimized, and the surprisal theory which predicts that processing time increases with big changes in the relative entropy of possible parses, sometimes leading to anti-locality effects. We consider both lexicalised surprisal, expressed in conditional trigram probabilities, and syntactic surprisal expressed in the manipulation of the expectedness of the second NP in Danish constructions with two postverbal NP-objects. An eye-tracking experiment showed a clear advantage for local syntactic relations, with only a marginal effect of lexicalised surprisal and no effect of syntactic surprisal. We conclude that surprisal has a relatively marginal effect, which may be clearest for verbs in verb-final languages, while locality is a robust predictor of sentence processing. © 2017 Springer Science+Business Media New York
KW - Sentence processing
KW - Eye tracking
KW - Locality
KW - Surprisal theory
KW - Danish language
KW - Sentence processing
KW - Eye tracking
KW - Locality
KW - Surprisal theory
KW - Danish language
UR - https://sfx-45cbs.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/45cbs?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_ctx_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info:sid/sfxit.com:azlist&sfx.ignore_date_threshold=1&rft.object_id=954925462140
U2 - 10.1007/s10936-017-9482-2
DO - 10.1007/s10936-017-9482-2
M3 - Journal article
VL - 46
SP - 1119
EP - 1136
JO - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
JF - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
SN - 0090-6905
IS - 5
ER -