It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long

Past research has produced evidence that parsing commitments strengthen over the processing of additional linguistic elements that are consistent with the commitments and undoing strong commitments takes more time than undoing weak commitments. It remains unclear, however, whether this so-called dig...

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Main Authors: Arai, Manabu, Shikanai, Chie
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Public Library of Science 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/107806
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4534-7385
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author Arai, Manabu
Shikanai, Chie
author2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
author_facet Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Arai, Manabu
Shikanai, Chie
author_sort Arai, Manabu
collection MIT
description Past research has produced evidence that parsing commitments strengthen over the processing of additional linguistic elements that are consistent with the commitments and undoing strong commitments takes more time than undoing weak commitments. It remains unclear, however, whether this so-called digging-in effect is exclusively due to the length of an ambiguous region or at least partly to the extra cost of processing these additional phrases. The current study addressed this issue by testing Japanese relative clause structure, where lexical content and sentence meaning were controlled for. The results showed evidence for a digging-in effect reflecting the strengthened commitment to an incorrect analysis caused by the processing of additional adjuncts. Our study provides strong support for the dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing but poses a problem for other models including serial two-stage models as well as frequency-based probabilistic models such as the surprisal theory.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1078062022-09-27T22:35:45Z It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long Arai, Manabu Shikanai, Chie Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy Shikanai, Chie Past research has produced evidence that parsing commitments strengthen over the processing of additional linguistic elements that are consistent with the commitments and undoing strong commitments takes more time than undoing weak commitments. It remains unclear, however, whether this so-called digging-in effect is exclusively due to the length of an ambiguous region or at least partly to the extra cost of processing these additional phrases. The current study addressed this issue by testing Japanese relative clause structure, where lexical content and sentence meaning were controlled for. The results showed evidence for a digging-in effect reflecting the strengthened commitment to an incorrect analysis caused by the processing of additional adjuncts. Our study provides strong support for the dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing but poses a problem for other models including serial two-stage models as well as frequency-based probabilistic models such as the surprisal theory. 2017-03-31T20:41:51Z 2017-03-31T20:41:51Z 2016-06 2015-07 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 1932-6203 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/107806 Arai M, Nakamura C (2016) It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long. PLoS ONE 11(6): e0156482. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4534-7385 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0156482 PLOS ONE Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/pdf Public Library of Science PLOS
spellingShingle Arai, Manabu
Shikanai, Chie
It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long
title It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long
title_full It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long
title_fullStr It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long
title_full_unstemmed It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long
title_short It’s Harder to Break a Relationship When you Commit Long
title_sort it s harder to break a relationship when you commit long
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/107806
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4534-7385
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