Evidence from behavioral experiments: Information theory and discourse-based accounts of long-distance dependencies

Abstract

For decades, linguists and psychologists have sought to understand why some long-distance dependencies sound grammatical while others less so, and how people process them. In this dissertation, I investigate these puzzles and get promising results, using a variety of behavioral experiments and statistical modeling. This dissertation consists of three experimental projects, examining how various factors from language exposure, communicative pressure, discourse, syntax and semantics shape people’s acceptability and interpretation of long-distance dependencies. I find that our frequency-based processing proposal provides a more succinct explanation for the observed acceptability data of the tested island phenomena than the previous discourse, syntactic and semantic accounts. In addition, I show that experimental data reflecting the referential properties of Chinese anaphors support the discourse-based logophoricity accounts, not the pure syntactic theories. I have also better characterized the structural prior and the source of non-literal interpretations in noisy-channel processing of filler-gap constructions.