Processing of Centre-embedded and Right-branching Relative Clauses in Slovenian

Katarina Marjanovič, Christina Manouilidou / Processing of Centre-embedded and Right-branching Relative Clauses in Slovenian Katarina Marjanovič, Christina Manouilidou Univerza v Ljubljani Processing of Centre-embedded and Right-branching Relative Clauses in Slovenian 1 Introduction* The processing of relative clauses (RC) has been a reoccurring topic of interest in the last five decades of psycholinguistic research. Throughout this time, one of the most important issues of this line of research has been the difficulty of processing of centreembedded relative clauses1 (CE-RC; e.g., The girl who is drinking the water hugged the mother.), which is often addressed through the comparison to the processing of right-branching relative clauses (RB-RC; e.g., The girl hugged the mother who is holding a flower.). This issue is so well documented that it has led to several theories which aim towards explaining the difficulties in the processing complexity of CE-RC. However, most of the evidence these theories are based on comes from English. In the current paper we introduce a study that focuses on this aspect, and which provides evidence from Slovenian that was previously largely lacking. 1.1 Processing of centre-embedded and right-branching relative clauses When it comes to the differences in the processing of CE-RC and RB-RC, the decades of research have led to a current consensus that CE-RC are much harder to understand than RB-RC, which typically results in longer reading times of such structures and/ or accuracy of the participant’s performance (in terms of, for example responses to comprehension questions, sentence recall). So far, this finding has been confirmed both in auditory and visual modality, in a number of different paradigms, e.g., an auditory sentence comprehension task (Blaubergs and Braine, 1974), free recall of auditorily presented sentences (Miller and Isard, 1964), phoneme monitoring task (Foss, 1969; Hakes and Cairns, 1970), written sentence comprehension task (Freedle and Craun, 1970; Blumenthal, 1966), * 1 The current research was supported by ARRS grant J6-1806 awarded to Christina Manouilidou. Two other terms are also used to label this type of relative clause: (1) self-embedded and (2) nested relative clause. DOI:10.4312/ars.16.2.213-228 213 AH_2022_2_FINAL.indd 213 6. 03. 2023 13:16:05 Katarina Marjanovič, Christina Manouilidou / Processing of Centre-embedded and Right-branching Relative Clauses in Slovenian combination of free reading of printed sentences and listening of auditorily presented sentences (Stolz, 1967), and self-paced reading paradigm (Gibson et al., 2005). Importantly, this difference is also observed when the two structures contain the same words in the same thematic roles. This suggests that the observed complexity differences between the two cannot be assigned to the difference in the lexical or contextual information, but rather to the difference in the amount of computational resources needed to successfully process them (Gibson et al., 2005). While different proposals have been made as to what affects the processing complexity of embedded relative clauses (e.g., the interruption hypothesis2 of Miller and Chomsky (1963), and see also Gibson et al. (2005) for a short overview of several proposals), one of the most influential ones is the so called dependency locality theory (DLT) (Gibson, 2000). According to DLT, the processing complexity of embedded structures depends on the distance or locality between the two dependents that are being integrated (Gibson, 1998; Gibson et al., 2005), where a larger distance introduces a heavier computational load. For example, compare the distance between the verb hugged and its dependent (D) in the following sentences, where 1a is an example of a CE-RC and 1b of an RB-RC: 1a. The girl (D) who is drinking the water hugged the mother. 1b. The girl (D) hugged the mother who is holding a flower. More recently, the theory has been expanded to include two key components that contribute to the cost of the syntactic operations in humans: storage cost, quantified by the number of the incoming words or the number of predictions about the incoming words as the sentence is processed, and integration cost, representing the memory load as the incoming word is being integrated with the previously processed syntactic representation, which is sensitive to the distance between the dependent and its head (Gibson, 2000). Importantly, this theory is thought to be language-independent (Gibson, 1998, 2000), but most empirical evidence for it comes from English. However, in order to make proposals about any language processing factors, one needs to examine if the previously observed effects are in fact a result of language processing in general, or a result of characteristics of specific language (Reid and Marslen-Wilson, 2000; Frost, 2012). While some evidence is also emerging in other languages – see, for example, Gibson and Wu (2013) for Chinese, Babyonyshev and Gibson (1999) for Japanese, Grillo and Costa (2014) for Italian, Lovric (2003) for Croatian – Slovenian remains largely under-investigated in this regard. 2 Miller’s interruption hypothesis (Miller and Chomsky, 1963) suggests that each nested structure (such as CE-RC) interrupts the sequential order of the clause in which it is embedded, in turn interrupting the processing of the main clause between the verb and its dependent – which is not the case in an RB-RC, where the clauses appear in a sequential order. 214 AH_2022_2_FINAL.indd 214 6. 03. 2023 13:16:06 Katarina Marjanovič, Christina Manouilidou / Processing of Centre-embedded and Right-branching Relative Clauses in Slovenian 1.2 Previous findings from the Slovenian language While relative clauses in Slovenian are well-described in the field of linguistics (e.g., Cazinkić, 2000; Cvetko Orešnik and Orešnik, 2009; Gabrovšek, 2019; Gabrovšek and Žele, 2019; Sovrè, 1939; Toporišič, 2004), there is to the best of our knowledge only one study on this topic in the field of psycholinguistics (Pavlič and Stepanov, 2020). The latter very recently investigated the difference between processing of CE-RC and RB-CR in a self-paced reading experiment. As the authors themselves pointed out, their results revealed an unexpected pattern – in contrast to previous research in other languages, the observed reading times were longer in RB-RC than in CE-RC (see Table 1 for example sentences from Pavlič and Stepanov, 2020). Table 1: Examples of a centre-embedded relative clause (CE-RC) and rightbranching relative clause (RB-RC) as they appear in Pavlič and Stepanov (2020). CE-RC Policist, ki je oviral motorista na odstavnem pasu, je prezrl taksista. RB-RC The policeman who was blocking the motorcyclist in the emergency lane overlooked the taxi driver. Policist je prezrl taksista, ki je oviral motorist na odstavnem pasu. The policeman overlooked the taxi driver who was blocking the motorcyclist in the e (...truncated)