Relaciones vinculares

The first psycholinguistic study done on crossed dependencies in Dutch, is Bach et al. (1986), ‘Crossed and nested dependencies in German and Dutch: A psycholinguistic study’ (Language and Cognitive Processes). Their main point of interest was to get real judgments on clause-final verbal clusters, given that a lot attention had been given in the literature to the variations in word order (cf. Evers, 1975; 1986, Koster, 1984; Haegeman and Van Riemsdijk, 1986), without any psycholinguistic study having been done. Also, they wanted to compare the difficulty in Dutch and German directly, this being of crucial importance to the theories explored in the literature (again, see chapter two). 4.2.1 The experiment

To the purpose described above, Bach et al. designed 18 matched sets of three sentences in both languages, which varied in complexity: level 1 contained two NPs and no embedding, level 2 three NPs and one embedding, level 3 four NPs and two embeddings and level 4 five NPs and three embeddings. Note thus that ‘level’ doesn’t say anything about the amount of embeddings (so it’s a weird label, really). They didn’t have as many test sentences at a third level of embedding since they had problems in “finding semantically plausible extensions” for many of them (Bach et al., 1986:251). Furthermore, because the increase in syntactic complexity in level invariably covaried with an increase in semantic and propositional complexity, Bach et al. formed control sentences which were paraphrases of the test sentences. Finally, the German items were divided (or rather multiplied) into two groups, since the informants could not agree on whether the last verb should be in infinitival or participle form. The distinction was useful, since it eventually gave different results.

69 These were the test levels, which were presented with paraphrased sentences on each level as a control80:

Level 1: De lerares heeft de knikkers opgeruimd. Dutch

Die Lehrerin hat die Murmeln aufgeräumt. German

The teacher has the marbles collected.up ‘The teacher collected up the marbles’

Level 2: John heeft de lerares de knikkers helpen opruimen. John hat der Lehrerin die Murmeln aufräumen helfen. John has the teacher the marbles collect.up help ‘John helped the teacher collect up the marbles’

Level 3: Kevin heeft John de lerares de knikkers laten helpen opruimen. Kevin hat John der Lehrerin die Murmeln aufräumen helfen lassen. Kevin has John the teacher the marbles collect.up help let ‘Kevin let John help the teacher collect up the marbles’

Level 4: Ingrid heeft Lotte de bewoners de blinde het eten horen leren helpen koken. Ingrid hat Lotte die Bewohner dem Blinden das Essen kochen helfen lehren hören. Ingrid has Lotte the residents the blind man the food cook help learn hear ‘Ingrid heard Lotte teach the residents to help the blind man to cook the food’

The materials were presented auditorially to the subjects, who had to perform a rating task immediately upon hearing each sentence. They had to answer the question ‘how easy is this sentence to understand’ on a 9-point scale. Next to this there was a comprehension task, which comprised of a yes/no-question the subjects had to answer. The total of 72 sentences was preceded by 15 practice sentences and a short break for extra instructions or questions.

4.2.2 Results and discussion

The results of Bach et al.’s experiment showed that, at least for level 3 and 4, the intuition expressed in the literature that crossed Dutch structures are less difficult to process, is supported (cf. Evers, 1975). Not only the subjects’ comprehensibility judgments, but also the error rate in the question answering task pointed in this direction. That is, the Dutch sentences were rated higher (‘easy to comprehend’) and less errors were made in the question task as compared to German. There was however no difference at level 2 (two levels of embedding): not for the judgment, nor for the error-rate81. See the following graphs (the means are collapsed across items and subjects within the three language groups: Dutch, German/participle and German/infinitive)82,83:

80

Examples of paraphrased sentence are, for level 2:

(a) Jantje heeft de lerares geholpen om de knikkers op te ruimen.

Jantje has the teacher helped to the marbles up.to.clean

(b) Wolfgang hat der Lehrerin geholfen, die Murmeln aufzuräumen.

Wolfgang has the teacher helped the marbles up.to.clean

81 _{Though there was considerable difference between the two German types: whereas the participle-version}

patterned with the Dutch, the German infinitive-version scored much lower in comprehensibility rating (thus being experienced to be more difficult). Note that, interestingly enough, in Dutch an infinitive occurs on the last position in these sentences, and not a participle.

82 _{Level 1 was not represented in any of the graphs or result overviews, for some reason that is unclear to me.} 83 _{The graphs are taken from Bach et al. (1986).}

70 Graph 1: Mean differences in comprehensibility ratings between test and paraphrase sentences

71 The explanation the authors suggest is that in the Dutch case the matrix of higher verbs can begin to be built up immediately when the verb cluster begins, without the risk of creating structures that may have to be re-analysed in the light of later information. In the German case however, it is not possible to figure out what to do with this structure until the higher verbs come in one by one (Bach et al, 1986). That is, these results suggest that what is important for the facility of parsing and interpretation is not only when information becomes available, but also what you can do with that information. Bach et al. argue that, in a sentence like (1), it is only of relatively little use to the German listener to know that [Anna milked the cows], because there is no higher structure into which this information can be integrated when received. The listener thus has to keep this information in an intermediate store, leading to a rise in parsing efforts rather than facilitation.

(1) a. Henk heeft de kinderen Anna de koeien laten zien melken. Henk has the children Anna the cows let see milk

b. Hans hat die Kinder Anna die Kühe melken sehen lassen. Henk has the children Anna the cows milk see let

‘Hans has let the children watch Anna milk the cows’

The semantics for both sentences however is argued by Bach et al. to be as follows: (2) P(let (Hans, (see (the children, (milk (Anneke, the cows))))))

And the underlying structure for both sentences is considered to be84: (3) [Henk has [the children [[Anna cows] milk] see] let]

This semantic structure and the underlying structure clearly have the most similarities with the German structure. The question thus arises why the Dutch version should be easier at all (given that for the interpretation, the syntactic elements would have to be placed back in their original positions in Dutch). Bach et al. seem to argue for an approach where syntactic trees are build top-down: in that case, a rather big substructure has to be kept in mind for German before it can be integrated in the overall structure (since the ‘highest’ verb, V1, is encountered last), which might lead to the processing problems encountered.

In the previous chapters however we have seen that the OV-approach, upon closer scrutiny, in fact predicts that the Dutch structure is more difficult than the German structure. Dutch requires more processing effort as elements have to be placed back in their original positions for interpretation, while the German surface word order approaches the underlying order closest (as also shows from the examples (1)-(3) above). In the VO-approach on the other hand, most syntactic processes (and displacements) take place in the German structure, and have therefore been predicted to take more effort to process.

Interestingly, the parsing differences between Dutch and German described above are problems on level 4, but not level 2. So it might be the case that we are approaching the working memory limits with the bigger amount of embeddings. The Dutch listeners also suffer some degree of overload at level 3 (they showed a large drop in performance as well), but they do consistently better than the German listeners. Even though they are also losing material, what they do retain seems to be integrated into a more coherent and long-lasting structure than what is possible with the German nested order, argue Bach et al. Thus the question remains why there is such a sharp difference between two and three levels of embedding (i.e. when the structures become notoriously more difficult). Bach et al. suggest that this could have to do with working memory storage limits, and in fact that will be proposed in later studies too, as we shall see shortly.

72 However interesting, Bach et al. (1986)’s study was an off-line study, and therefore cannot show us exactly what is going on at what point of the sentence. We would need an on-line study for that. There are, to my knowledge, two on-line studies on the processing of cross-serial dependencies:

(i) Center-embedded structures in Dutch: An on-line study M. W. Dickey and W. Vonk, 1997, unpublished.

(ii) Cross-serial dependencies in Dutch: testing the influence of NP type on processing load E. Kaan and N. Vasić, 2004, Memory and Cognition.

We will go into these two studies separately now.