Category Locality Theory: A unified account of locality effects in sentence comprehension

Cognition. 2024 Apr 6;247:105766. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105766. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTIn real-time sentence comprehension, the comprehender is often required to establish syntactic dependencies between words that are linearly distant. Major models of sentence comprehension assume that longer dependencies are more difficult to process because of working memory limitations. While the expected effect of distance on reading times (locality effect) has been robustly observed in certain constructions, such as relative clauses in English, its generalizability to a wider range of constructions has been empirically questioned. The current study proposes a new metric of syntactic distance that capitalizes on the flexible constituency of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), and argues that it offers a unified account of the locality effects. It is shown that this metric correctly predicts both the presence of the locality effect in English relative clauses and its absence in verb-final languages, without assuming language- or dependency-specific differences in the sensitivity to the locality effect. It is further shown that the CCG-based distance is a significant predictor of the self-paced reading times from an English corpus, even when other known predictors such as dependency-based locality and surprisal are taken into account. These results suggest that human sentence comprehension involves rapid integration of input words into efficiently compressed syntactic repre...

Source: Cognition - April 7, 2024 Category: Neurology Authors: Shinnosuke Isono Source Type: research