Passives are not hard to interpret but hard to remember: evidence from online and offline studies

被引:16
作者
Paolazzi, Caterina Laura [1 ]
Grillo, Nino [2 ]
Alexiadou, Artemis [3 ,4 ]
Santi, Andrea [1 ]
机构
[1] UCL, Dept Linguist, London, England
[2] Univ York, Dept Language & Linguist Sci, York, N Yorkshire, England
[3] Humboldt Univ, Inst Anglist & Amerikanist, Sprach & Literaturwissensch Fak, Berlin, Germany
[4] Leibniz Ctr Gen Linguist ZAS, Berlin, Germany
关键词
language comprehension; passivization; heuristics; surprisal; self-paced reading; WORKING-MEMORY CAPACITY; INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES; GOOD-ENOUGH; LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION; SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY; FLUID INTELLIGENCE; RELATIVE CLAUSES; SENTENCES; INTERFERENCE; AGE;
D O I
10.1080/23273798.2019.1602733
中图分类号
R36 [病理学]; R76 [耳鼻咽喉科学];
学科分类号
100104 ; 100213 ;
摘要
Passive sentences are considered more difficult to comprehend than active sentences. Previous online-only studies cast doubt on this generalisation. The current paper directly compares online and offline processing of passivization and manipulates verb type: state vs. event. Stative passives are temporarily ambiguous (adjectival vs. verbal), eventive passives are not (always verbal). Across 4 experiments (self-paced reading with comprehension questions), passives were consistently read faster than actives. This contradicts the claim that passives are difficult to parse and/or interpret, as argued by main perspectives of passive processing (heuristic, syntactic, frequentist). The reading time facilitation is compatible with broader expectation/surprisal theories. When comprehension targeted theta-role assignment, passives were more errorful, regardless of verb type. Verbal WM measures correlated with the difference in accuracy, but not online measures. The accuracy effect is argued to reflect a post-interpretive difficulty associated with maintaining/manipulating the passive representation as required by specific tasks.
引用
收藏
页码:991 / 1015
页数:25
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