The role of relative item salience in memory-taxing sentence structures

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  • March 22, 2019
Creator
  • Johnson, Marcus
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Abstract
  • Experiments 1 and 2 show that the frequencies of the critical noun phrases (NPs) of sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) can reduce the difference in difficulty experienced when reading sentences containing object-extracted RCs as compared with sentences containing subject-extracted RCs. This reduction in the processing difficulty of the usually burdensome object-extracted RCs, as compared with subject-extracted RCs, only occurs when the head NP is low frequency (LF) and the embedded NP is HF, but not under any other combination of NP frequency. This finding can be attributed to the enhanced salience of LF items as compared with HF items and the impact that this relative salience has on memory processes. Experiment 3 manipulates salience via adjectival modification of the head NP while keeping frequency constant. A reduction in the processing difficulty of object-extracted RCs is found under adjectival modification that mirrors the results of the frequency manipulations. Experiment 4 attempts to determine whether the critical process involved in comprehending RCs is recall of the head NP or recall of the embedded NP. It does so by separating the two loci of retrieval via a multi-lexemic embedded predicate. The results indicate that the presence of multi-lexemic predicates precludes the manifestation of relative salience effects.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Gordon, Peter
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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  • Open access
Date uploaded
  • October 11, 2010

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