Syntactic Complexity
What is syntactic complexity?
Syntactic complexity is the factor that influences how ease one can understand and interpret a sentence.
What is a negation?
A word or statement that denies the meaning of a statement, turning a positive thing to the the opposite.
What is incremental interpretation?
Incremental interpretation is the observation that listeners and readers make inferences about the unfolding sounds and words before hearing the whole the sentence instead of waiting for chunks to be spoken and then making inferences.
Most sentences in English, the _____ comes first, followed by a _____.
subject; verb
In the study, did participants respond faster to negative or affirmative sentences?
Affirmative sentences
What is the task called for a measure of language comprehension in which masked words appear repeatedly as the reader presses the key?
self-paced reading task
In a more complex sentence, what appears before the subject?
The object
What two words does the textbook example use to explain what a negation is?
"no" and "not"
What does the self-paced reading task provide?
Reaction time data
True or False: Many self‐paced reading experiments indicate that participants show some difficulty when processing sentences like (B) relative to sentences like (A) in the textbook reading.
True.
True or False: A sentence does not almost always require more processing time if it has an negation than a affirmatively worded sentence.
False.
What is the purpose of reaction time data?
The purpose of reaction time data is so that researchers can measure our processing difficulty.
Psycholinguists conduct research to determine how memory and practice through language experience work together to explain what?
To explain why sentences with complex grammar are difficult to interpret or understand.
What were the name of the individuals that showed a picture of a star above a plus sign in a classic study?
Clark and Chase
Participants reveal words one at a time by pressing the ______
spacebar