Meaning Through Syntax: Language Comprehension and the Reduced Relative Clause Construction

A new explanation is proposed for a long standing question in psycholinguistics: Why are some reduced relative clauses so difficult to comprehend? It is proposed that the meanings of some verbs like race are incompatible with the meaning of the reduced relative clause and that this incompatibility m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological review 2003-07, Vol.110 (3), p.490-525
Main Authors: McKoon, Gail, Ratcliff, Roger
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Grammar
Human
Humans
Language
Linguistics
Listening comprehension
Mental Processes
Miscellaneous
Models, Psychological
Perception
Psycholinguistics
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Sentence Comprehension
Sentence Structure
Syntax
Theories
Verbal Meaning
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Summary:A new explanation is proposed for a long standing question in psycholinguistics: Why are some reduced relative clauses so difficult to comprehend? It is proposed that the meanings of some verbs like race are incompatible with the meaning of the reduced relative clause and that this incompatibility makes sentences like The horse raced past the barn fell unacceptable. In support of their hypotheses, the authors show that reduced relatives of The horse raced past the barn fell type occur in naturally produced sentences with a near-zero probability, whereas reduced relatives with other verbs occur with a probability of about 1 in 20. The authors also support the hypotheses with a number of psycholinguistic experiments and corpus studies.
ISSN:0033-295X
1939-1471
DOI:10.1037/0033-295X.110.3.490