Incremental Processing Effects in Nominal Compounds.

摘要

Sentence processing shows the effects of a series of continual building, repairing, predicting, accessing, and remembering operations that may be the output of one underlying process or many. Within even smaller phrases such as nominal compounds, we see all of these operations having an effect. What is relatively unknown, though, is how these processes interact with each other in real time as the phrase is build up incrementally. This ERP study, through the use of an Icelandic triple noun compound paradigm that manipulates agreement features on the first and second constituents of the compound, investigates the nature of commitments to a structure and the processes that predict more structure or revise an interpreted structure. The findings are generally in line with models that have a parser make commitments to a structure as soon as possible, and the findings expand on that to say that syntactic mismatch is sufficient to trigger a structural prediction and that a revision of that prediction is identical to the revision of a structure built from incoming lexical items. This study further uses the paradigm to assess the predictions of Gibson's (1998) model of sentence processing that makes use of working memory costs. The study finds that, when incremental commitments are taken into account, we see the effects of syntactic agreement cues modulating working memory effects.