To understand the sentence """"""""Who did the girl the teacher forced to talk complain to?"""""""" One must determine that """"""""the girl"""""""" is to be taken as the missing subject of the verb """"""""talk"""""""" and that """"""""who"""""""" is the missing object of the preposition """"""""to."""""""" Sentences with such long-distance dependencies as that between """"""""the girl"""""""" and the subject position preceding """"""""to talk"""""""" pose special problems for theories of sentence comprehension. They challenge the apparent human limits on short-term memory and processing capacity, in that arbitrary amounts of linguistic material can intervene between the items that are dependent upon each other and any one sentence can contain several long-distance dependencies. Further, they are subject to unique linguistic constraints that a language user must honor. We propose experiments to study the comprehension of sentences with long-distance dependencies, using reaction time and other measures of processing difficulty. Our goals are to determine what decision principles people follow in understanding such sentences, to identify the various types of information (lexical, pragmatic, suprasegmental, grammatical constraints) they use in making decisions about long-distance dependencies, and to specify the sequence in which they use functionally different types of information.
| Clifton Jr, Charles; Frazier, Lyn (2016) Accommodation to an Unlikely Episodic State. J Mem Lang 86:20-34 |
| Frazier, Lyn (2015) Two interpretive systems for natural language? J Psycholinguist Res 44:7-25 |
| Frazier, Lyn (2015) Do Null Subjects (mis-)Trigger Pro-drop Grammars? J Psycholinguist Res 44:669-74 |
| Frazier, Lyn; Clifton Jr, Charles (2015) Without his shirt off he saved the child from almost drowning: interpreting an uncertain input. Lang Cogn Neurosci 30:635-647 |
| Frazier, Lyn; Clifton Jr, Charles; Carlson, Katy et al. (2014) Standing alone with prosodic help. Lang Cogn Process 29:459-469 |
| Benatar, Ashley; Clifton Jr, Charles (2014) Newness, Givenness and Discourse Updating: Evidence from Eye Movements. J Mem Lang 71: |
| Dillon, Brian; Clifton Jr, Charles; Frazier, Lyn (2014) Pushed aside: Parentheticals, Memory and Processing. Lang Cogn Neurosci 29:483-498 |
| Harris, Jesse A; Clifton Jr, Charles; Frazier, Lyn (2013) Processing and domain selection: Quantificational variability effects. Lang Cogn Process 28:1519-1544 |
| Clifton Jr, Charles; Frazier, Lyn (2013) Partition if You Must: Evidence for a No Extra Times Principle. Discourse Process 50: |
| Breen, Mara; Clifton Jr, Charles (2013) Stress matters revisited: a boundary change experiment. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 66:1896-909 |
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