Effects of NP type in reading cleft sentences in English

This paper investigates factors which contribute to the complexity of English sentences with long-distance dependencies. Two hypotheses were compared: (1) increased referential processing between the endpoints of a dependency increases processing difficulty at the completion of the dependency (Gibson, 1998 Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68: 1–76. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2000 Gibson, E. 2000. “The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity”. In Image, language, brain, Edited by: Miyashita, Y., Marantz, A. and O'Niel, W. 95–126. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]; Warren & Gibson, 2002 Warren, T. and Gibson, E. 2002. The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity. Cognition, 85: 79–112. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and (2) increased similarity between NPs awaiting role-assignment increases memory interference during retrieval (Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001 Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R. and Johnson, M. 2001. Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 27: 1411–1423. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Self-paced word-by-word moving-window reading times were gathered over object-extracted cleft sentences in which two NPs were varied among definite descriptions, first names, and pronouns. Reading times at the verb supported both hypotheses. As the referential hypothesis predicted, reading times were faster when the intervening subject NP had a more referentially accessible type. Consistent with the similarity hypothesis, reading times were slow when both NPs were names or descriptions. Later comprehension measures showed strong effects of similarity-based interference, but did not show effects of referential processing load.