Long Distance Dependency Structure Of The Sentence Comprehension Study

The existence of long-distance dependencies in language makes parsing difficult, that is to say, words and phrases that are related to one another are not necessarily adjacent in a sentence. Our study researched four types of Chinese sentences: SS, OS, SOa and SOb, which include the long-distance dependency in adolescent for the traits of on-line and off-line sentence processing. We investigated the differences between high working memory participants and low working memory participants respectively in three grades and the differences among the three groups. We also explored the processing mechanism of the four types of Chinese sentences.There were 30 experimental sentences of each type. All sentences were followed by a single question. The questions composed of "first verb question" and "second verb question". These questions were either true or false and required the participant to determine the subject of the first or second verb in the sentence.We used two research methods in our study. In experiment 1, each participant group included 25 students, they came from junior school, senior high school and college, respectively. We use a word-by-word visual moving window technique to test the reading time of on-line sentence comprehension and to prove the time and wrong percent of off-line comprehension questions. In experiment 2, there were 26 junior school students, 26 senior high school students and 23 college students, the Eyelink II eye tracker was used to investigate the on-line sentence processing. Many eye movement indexes were analyzed, such as, total fixation time, first fixation duration, first run dwell time, second fixation duration and regression.The results showed that:(1) With the development of the participants, they took less time on on-line sentences processing and off-line questions, they also show greater accuracy in off-line questions, their reading ability improved as well.(2) Participants in the three groups had more difficulty with SOa sentences than with SS, OS and SOb sentences. The differences had been reflected in longer reading times and lower off-line comprehension scores for SOa than for other sentences.