The clausal hypothesis
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P160
2025-11-09
262
The clausal hypothesis
The clausal hypothesis is related to the derivational theory of complexity. In essence the clausal hypothesis claims that the clause is the basic unit of analysis in language comprehension. The clause is a group of words in a sentence that includes a verb. There are finite clauses, where a verb can carry markings for tense and for number agreement, as in (10.10) or (10.11) and non-finite clauses with verbs that cannot be marked in this way, such as the underlined portion in (10.12). Finite clauses can include main verb clauses as in (10.10) and (10.11), but also subordinate clauses such as the relative clause underlined in (10.13).
The clausal hypothesis is a special instance, for language, of a chunking’ process. The usefulness of chunking is demonstrated in experiments in which subjects are better able to remember number sequences if they are encouraged to chunk them. So remembering a telephone number as a sequence of two chunks, as in (10.14) is easier than remembering the single longer sequence as in (10.15).
It was hypothesised that language chunking might proceed on the basis of sentence structure, i.e. that sentences are chunked into units like clauses. As a test of this, a series of experiments used what is called a click location experiment (Fodor & Bever, 1965; Garrett, Bever & Fodor, 1966; Holmes & Forster, 1970). Participants were given a printed version of a sentence, such as one of those in (10.16) and (10.17), but without the additional markings (/and /).
The participants then heard a recording of the sentence, onto which a click (or a beep) had been added, for instance at the position indicated in the examples by l. Their task was to mark on the printed version where the click had occurred. What the experimenters were interested in was whether the nature of a syntactic boundary close to the click would affect the likelihood that the click would migrate’, perceptually, to that boundary (the click displacement effect’) . They found that participants were more likely to erroneously report clicks at the boundary between the subject and predicate of the main clause, marked by / in the examples, in sentences like 10.16 than in sentences like (10.17). This is because in (10.16) the subject-predicate boundary is also the end of the relative clause who taught t the biggest dass. The experimenters claimed that this result pro vides evidence for the clausal hypothesis.
Processing within clauses
However, critics of the clausal hypothesis point out that we must be careful to distinguish between clausal structuring and clausal processing (Marslen-Wilson, Tyler & Seidenberg, 1978). The former is a claim that language is segmented into clauses at some stage during comprehension, but that processing can carry on during a clause. The latter is a stronger claim about clause structure, i.e. that processing is concentrated at clause boundaries. Evidence for a claim that processing does not take place solely at these points but is carried out within clauses comes from online studies of comprehension, which track word-by-word analysis of the sentence. Contrast offline tasks. See sidebar. One instance of this is the word monitoring task employed by Marslen-Wilson and Tyler (1980). In this task, participants are told to listen for a word which may or may not occur in a sentence which they then hear. Their task is to press a response button as soon as they hear that word, if it is present. The mate rials included sentences such as (10.18), a normal prose sentence, which is both meaningful and syntactically well-formed; (10.19), an anomalous prose sentence, which is meaningless but syntactically well-formed and in fact has the same sentence structure as (10.18); and (10.20), a scram bled prose string which is both meaningless and syntactically ill formed.
In examples (10.18)–(10.20), the same target word is used shown in bold, and it is in the same serial position in each example. Across the experiment, the position of the target words was deliberately varied, so that the effect of accumulating information across the utterance could be measured.
The results from these experiments show an overall advantage for normal prose over anomalous prose and for anomalous prose over scrambled prose. In terms of position effects, the results show first that there is no advantage for one sentence type over any of the others at the first word position. This is not surprising because when the target word appears at this position it does not yet have any contextual support. Second, in normal prose sentences 10.18 there is a marked decrease in word monitoring times the later a word is in the sentence. Third, anomalous prose sentences (10.19) also show a decrease in monitoring times, although the change across the sentence is less dramatic than for nor mal prose. Finally, scrambled sentences show practically no serial position effect. The key results are that when the sentence has structure, a word within that sentence can be responded to more rapidly; that this response facilitation increases as more of the sentence is heard; and that the availability of both syntactic and semantic meaning structure results in a faster decrease in response times than the availability of syntactic structure alone. These results support the claim that sentence processing does not need to wait until major structural boundaries, but can take place in a cumulative way as the sentence is heard (Marslen Wilson & Tyler, 1980).
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