Cognitive effort during the processing of relative clauses with psychological predicates in Spanish: a pupillometric study (original) (raw)

2020

Abstract

The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well documented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages (e.g, in Span-ish; in English; in German; and French). However, this asymmetry has mostly been studied in sentences with transitive activity predicates (ACT), while there has been no evidence reported regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates (PSY). Memory based accounts of this phenomena predict a general locality preference for shorter filler-gap dependencies (Gibson, 1998; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). In the case RCs with ACTs, SRCs instantiate a shorter filler-gap dependency than ORCs and this explains why the former are easier to process. How-ever, considering the structural properties of PSYs in Spanish (see note 1), it’s in the case of ORCs that a shorter filler-gap dependency is established. Therefore, the processing of ORCs with these predicates should entail less difficulty and lower cognitive effort than SRCs. Task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPR) have been used as a reliable neurophysiological index of cognitive effort in different domains (Beatty, 1982; Beatty & Lucero-Wagoner, 2000). In the sen-tence comprehension domain, TEPRs have provided a measure of differential processing cost according to the type of structure and its syntactic complexity (e.g, Just and Carpenter, 1993; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004; Schluroff, 1982). Design: 33 subjects participated in an auditory sentence comprehension task. They were asked to listen to a sentence; then were showed an image and were prompted to judge whether the image they saw faithfully reflected the content of the sentence heard or not (see Fig. 1). The stimuli (n=20) consisted of RCs with PSYs (1) and with ACTs (2) (see note 2). We manipulated the type of RC with each predicate: SRCs (1.a and 2.a) and ORCs (1.b and 2.b). The images selected were counterbalanced to make the sen-tences either true or false. Response accuracy and reaction times (RTs), as well as TEPRs, were measured during the task. Pupil diameter was monitored using a desktop-mounted, video-based eye tracker (EyeLink 1000, SR Research Ltd., Ontario, Canada) at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. Results: on average, participants answered 89% (SE= 0.8%) of the total stimuli cor-rectly; Figs. 2 and 3 show mean correct answers and standard error, and mean RTs and stan-dard error (only RTs of correct answers were considered) according to condition respectively. Linear mixed-effect models were fitted for data analysis. Results show that RCs with PSYs were harder to comprehend (p=.02) and were processed more slowly (p<.001) than RCs with ACTs. As it was expected, in the case of RC with ACTs, SRCs were easier to comprehend (p=.003) and faster to process than ORCs (p=.004). In the case of PSYs, we found that ORCs were easier to comprehend (p=.007) but that there were no significant differences between ORCs and SRCs RTs (p=.58). Analysis of TEPRs (in progress): For each individual trial, mean pupil size during the presentation of the fixation cross will be considered as baseline pu-pil size. Cognitive effort of sentence processing will be operationalized as the difference be-tween the maximum pupil diameter size achieved during the exploration of the image and the pause after the response and the baseline pupil diameter size (ΔTEPR). Linear mixed-effects models will be fitted for data analysis with ΔTEPR as dependent variable, predicate type and RC type as fixed factors, log verb frequency as control factor, and item and subject as random factors. Discussion: Accuracy measures showed the expected pattern, i.e. opposite asymme-tries for SRC/ORC with ACTs and PSYs. However, the asymmetry is not evident for PSYs re-garding RTs. We hypothesize that while more time (compared to ACTs) leads to accurate res-ponses in the case of the less demanding ORC, it does not comprise enough time to get the right answer in the more difficult SRC. We will explore this issue using pupil size measures as a proxy of the entailed cognitive demand. Conclusions: Our results agree to some extent with the predictions of memory based explanations of the SRC/ORC asymmetry regarding the processing of RCs with PSYs in Spanish. Pupil size data will help understanding the dynamics of the cognitive effort entailed by the processing of these specific structures.

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