Una dificultad frecuente en los trabajos sobre desarrollo sintáctico infantil es la de explicar usos cuya configuración no responde a una forma canónica aunque cumplan esa función. En el caso de las Cláusulas Relativas la tipología de lenguas propone el concepto de “Estrategia de relativización” para comprender las diferentes formas con las que las lenguas articulan modificadores complejos posnominales. Este trabajo presenta los resultados de una investigación que analizó la producción espontánea y la recuperación de Cláusulas Relativas en 32 niños (...) y niñas, hablantes de español de 5 años, de Nivel Socioeconómico Medio y Bajo. Se consideró el desempeño sintáctico según variables poblacionales, pues existe una extensa tradición en la literatura sobre desarrollo sintáctico que atiende a esta incidencia. Se relevaron, describieron y clasificaron las CR siguiendo a Givón y Silva . Los objetivos de la investigación son, por un lado, considerar las ER y comparar su forma y frecuencia y, por otro lado, indagar cuáles son los factores que inciden en las diferencias. Los resultados muestran que las formas son comparables a usos de Estrategias de relativización descriptos previamente en población infantil y adulta para el español. Se releva una variación sintáctica novedosa, aducible al contexto particular de renarración. El análisis de diferencias de desempeño, según variables poblacionales, no reporta diferencias significativas, aunque sí se reportan al considerar tareas y Cláusulas Relativas Recuperadas ). El análisis de incidencia de variables poblacionales según tareas reporta diferencias significativas entre NSE Medio y Bajo para las CRREP. Los resultados permiten inferir que el uso infantil de CR no es una condición unicausal, ni completamente acreditable a la incidencia de factores poblacionales sino que es el resultado de la interacción entre condiciones poblacionales, lingüísticas, pragmáticointeraccionales y cognitivas. (shrink)

Memory limitations and probabilistic expectations are two key factors that have been posited to play a role in the incremental processing of natural language. Relative clauses (RCs) have long served as a key proving ground for such theories of language processing. Across three self-paced reading experiments, we test the online comprehension of Hungarian subject- and object-extracted RCs (SRCs and ORCs, respectively). We capitalize on the syntactic properties of Hungarian that allow for a variety of word orders within RCs, which helps (...) us to delineate the processing costs associated with memory demand and violated expectations. Results showed a processing cost at the RC verb for structures that have longer verb-argument distances, despite those structures being more frequent in the corpus. These findings thus support theories that attribute processing difficulty to memory limitations, rather than theories that attribute difficulty to less expected structures. (shrink)

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated several factors that influence the comprehension complexity of singly-embedded relative clauses (RCs) in English. Three factors were manipulated in Experiment 1, resulting in three main effects. First, object-extracted RCs were read more slowly than subject-extracted RCs, replicating previous work. Second, RCs that were embedded within the sentential complement of a noun were read more slowly than comparable RCs that were not embedded in this way. Third, and most interestingly, object-modifying RCs were read more slowly than (...) subject-modifying relative clauses. This result contradicts one of the central tenets of complexity research: that nested sentences are harder to understand than their right-branching equivalents (e.g., Miller and Chomsky 1963). It is hypothesized that this result followed from a combination of two information-flow factors: (1) background information is usually presented early in a sentence; and (2) restrictive RCs—the form of the RCs in Experiment 1—usually convey background information. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by comparing restrictive and non-restrictive RCs— which generally provide new information—in both subject- and objectmodifying positions. The results of the experiment were as predicted by the information-flow account: Only restrictive RCs were read more slowly when modifying objects. It is concluded that both resource and information-flow factors need to be considered in explaining RC complexity effects. (shrink)

Information‐theoretic complexity metrics, such as Surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003), are linking hypotheses that bridge theorized expectations about sentences and observed processing difficulty in comprehension. These expectations can be viewed as syntactic derivations constrained by a grammar. However, this expectation‐based view is not limited to syntactic information alone. The present study combines structural and non‐structural information in unified models of word‐by‐word sentence processing difficulty. Using probabilistic minimalist grammars (Stabler, 1997), we extend expectation‐based models to include (...) frequency information about noun phrase animacy. Entropy reductions derived from these grammars faithfully reflect the asymmetry between subject and object relatives (Staub, 2010; Staub, Dillon, & Clifton, 2017), as well as the effect of animacy on the measured difficulty profile (Lowder & Gordon, 2012; Traxler, Morris, & Seely, 2002). Visualizing probability distributions on the remaining alternatives at particular parser states allows us to explore new, linguistically plausible interpretations for the observed processing asymmetries, including the way that expectations about the relativized argument influence the processing of particular types of relative clauses (Wagers & Pendleton, 2016). (shrink)