This is a conceptual replication and extension using the grammatical maze task of Staub, Adrian, Charles Clifton, and Lyn Frazier (2006). “Heavy NP Shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from Eye movements”. In: Journal of Memory and Language 54.3, pp. 389–406. Using eye-tracking, Staub et al. had found that there are effects of obligatoriness of the object in English structures with Heavy NP Shift. Specifically, they found a relative slow-down on adverbials intervening between the verb and the object in conditions where the object was obligatory and a relative speeding up on the shifted NP. The aim was to replicate these two findings and to show that the slow-down effect persists on a second adverbial between verb and shifted NP.
The design is 2x2 with the factors of obligatoriness (obligatory vs. optional) and number of adverbials (one vs. two).
Built with Experiment
The experiment measures time taken to make a lexical decision in the maze task between the target word, which is a possible continuation of the sentence, and the distractor, which provides a very unlikely or impossible continuation. The stimuli are based on Staub et al. (2006)'s stimuli for experiment 1 but with the addition of conditions with a second PP. Moreover, the beginning of the sentences was slightly expanded to allow for the fact that grammatical maze tasks generally take a few words to stabilize.
The distractors were generated using A-maze (Boyce et al 2020) and then checked by hand for the quality of distractors.
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)
Boyce, Veronica, Richard Futrell, and Roger P Levy (2020). “Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty”. In: Journal of Memory and Language 11.
Staub, Adrian, Charles Clifton, and Lyn Frazier (2006). “Heavy NP Shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from Eye movements”. In: Journal of Memory and Language 54.3, pp. 389–406.
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