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 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.

过往研究已提供证据表明，解析承诺（parsing commitments）会在加工与该承诺一致的额外语言成分的过程中不断强化，且撤销强解析承诺所需的时间长于撤销弱解析承诺。然而，目前尚不明确这种所谓的固守效应（digging-in effect）是否仅由歧义区域的长度所导致，还是至少部分源于加工这些额外短语所产生的额外认知成本。本研究通过测试日语关系从句结构（该结构的词汇内容与句义均得到了控制）来解决这一问题。研究结果证实了固守效应的存在：该效应反映了因加工额外附加语而强化的对错误句法分析的解析承诺。本研究为句子加工的动态自组织模型提供了强有力的支撑，但却对包括序列双阶段模型在内的其他模型，以及诸如惊讶度理论（surprisal theory）这类基于频率的概率模型均提出了挑战。