Article,
Memory overload in sentence comprehension: Evidence from English and German (draft)
(Oct 1, 2007)
Abstract
Four experiments address the surprising finding by Gibson and Thomas
(1999) that omitting the middle verb in a double center embedding results
in an illusion of grammaticality. The explanation for this illusion is working-memory overload, which leads to the comprehender forgetting the prediction
of the verb. The consequence is a failure to notice the ungrammaticality. The
evidence for this online effect, however, is based on an offline acceptability
rating study involving English. We present English self-paced reading (SPR)
and eyetracking data that provide online evidence for the forgetting explanation. We also present German SPR and eyetracking studies that furnish
evidence consistent with memory overload effects but inconsistent with the
forgetting hypothesis. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference arises
due to the head-final nature of German: since head-final stuctures are more
frequent in German subordinate clauses than in English, predictions of upcoming verbs are not as easily forgotten as in English, even in the face of
memory overload. These results have important implications for localitybased theories of memory overload.
