| Popis: |
Anti-locality effects in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages are characterised by a facili-tation at the clause-final verb when the distance between the verb and its prior dependentsis increased. These effects are understood to be driven by a robust prediction mechanism.In this work, we revisit this rationale by replicating key anti-locality experiments for Hindi.Through a series of sentence completion studies we demonstrate that neither are clausefinal verbal predictions always robust, nor do these predictions necessarily improve withincreased distance. Despite the evidence from sentence completion studies, the self-pacedreading studies reported in this work show a facilitation at the critical verb with increasein the noun-verb distance compared to when this distance was short. We suggest that theobserved effects arise due to the formation of a shallow sentential representation where therequired syntactic dependencies are not formed. In other words, the facilitatory effect isnot driven by a robust prediction mechanism. This proposal is additionally supported by alack of high comprehension accuracy in multiple experiments. Additionally, our work showsthat robust verbal predictions are successfully made and these predictions are successfullymaintained in structures involving fewer clausal embeddings, and simple verb argumentstructure. This suggests that when preverbal complexity increases prediction suffers. To-gether the results demonstrate the overarching influence of working-memory constraints onverbal prediction in an SOV language like Hindi. |
