Complexity and sentence processing
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P158
2025-11-08
43
Complexity and sentence processing
Certain sentence structures are claimed to be more difficult to process than others. During the time of the transformational approach to grammar that was current in the 1960s and 1970s, it was argued that the more difficult structures were those that had undergone some changes in the history of their derivation. This is part of the derivational Theory of Complexity, which is discussed in the context of language production in Chapter 2. One derivational process in this grammatical framework produced passive sentences, such as 10.2. It was argued that a passive was derived from an underlying or logical form that expressed the basic idea of the sentence and which was closer in structure to the active version of the sentence in 10.1. Because they were further removed from this underlying form than active sentences, it was predicted that passive sentences would be more difficult to process, and that the comprehension of 10.2 would involve greater processing demands than the comprehension of 10.1.
Relative clauses in which the relative pronoun is the object of the embedded verb, as in 10.6 were predicted to be more difficult than those in which the relative pronoun is the subject 10.5. This is because the actual word order of the elements in the relative clause in 10.5 is the same as the assumed logical form of the clause (who chased the dog is subject – verb – object), while the surface order of the relative in 10.6 is not (who the dog chased) is object – subject – verb. A description of this difference in terms of constituent movements is given in Chapter 12.
Early evidence for the greater complexity of passive sentences like 10.2 came from a task which measures how long participants take to match sentences with pictures showing the events described in those sentences. This task took longer for the passive versions of sentences than for the active versions. Similar findings were reported for other sentence pairings with different syntactic contrasts such as (10.3)–(10.4) (Gough, 1965; Just & Carpenter, 1971) and (10.5)–(10.6) (Fodor & Garrett, 1967). However, subsequent research found that changing the perspective shown in the pictures so that for instance the boy is foregrounded in the picture corresponding to 10.2 had the result that responses to passives were no longer slower than those to actives. That is, grammatical structure is not the only factor that influences comprehension, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 11.
Other experimental tests of derivational complexity included a study where participants were given examples of transformationally related sentences, such as the pairs given in each of (10.7)–(10.9) (Miller & Mckean, 1964). The labels at the end of the examples show the nature of the trans formational relationship.
In all example pairs the first sentence is an affirmative active AA, which as we have seen was argued to be closest to the underlying logical form that was assumed to be the input to the transformations that derive the other sentence forms. In 10.7 the second sentence is a negative active NA, and has involved a single transformation. In 10.8 the second sentence is an affirmative passive AP, which also involves a single transformation, but a more complex one in terms of the movements of words involved. Sentence 10.9 has a negative passive NP sentence, which involves both the negativisation and the passivisation transformations.
For each trial, Miller and McKean presented one example pair such as 10.7–10.9 as a model. The participants were then given an affirmative active version of a different sentence and asked to transform it in their heads in the same way as had been shown by the example, pressing a response button to indicate when they had performed that transformation. To check the accuracy of their transformation they were then given a list of sentences from which they had to select a sentence that matched their transformed version of the original target sentence. The study found that the time taken to press the response button increased in line with the number and complexity of the transformations involved.
In a memory task it was demonstrated that sentences were more confusable with one another the more closely related they were in terms of transformations (Clifton & Odom, 196. More recent research along these lines has focused on the possibility that there is a bias towards statements, since statements are closer to the underlying’ affirmative active forms of sentences, which provide the propositional content required for comprehension. There are implications here for issues such as the use of leading questions in courts and the language used in advertising – for instance if the question Is brand X better than brand Y?’ involves accessing the propositional content brand X is better than brand Y’, then the question might be remembered as a claim that X is better than Y (Pandelaere & De witte, 2006).
In a further memory task, participants were required to memorise both a sentence and a list of unrelated words. It was found that the more com plex the sentence was, in transformational terms, the fewer words the participants could reliably remember (Savin & Perchonock, 1965).
Critics of these types of experiment have argued that they only provide indirect evidence for greater complexity in language processing. This is because explicit transformation of sentences is not something we do in everyday language processing. Asking participants in an experiment to do this is therefore playing into the hands of proponents of the transformational approach to language processing. The critics agree that if we ask participants to carry out a transformation from one sentence to another then this requires some mental operations, but they question whether these are the mental operations ordinarily involved in sentence comprehension. In addition, memory tasks such as those outlined above are not measures of the immediate processing of sentences. When we understand a sentence, we do not hold it in its original form in our memory. Instead, we process it and move on. Furthermore, from an experiential point-of view, readers and listeners have far greater exposure over their lifetimes to active than to passive sentences, a factor that must also be taken into account.
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