Date of Award
4-27-2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Matthew Lowder
Abstract
Several areas of psycholinguistics focus on the role of memory in language processing. Two of these areas are repair disfluencies and complex syntactic structures; however, these two topics have traditionally been investigated completely separately from one another. The current experiment combines these two topics by presenting listeners with spoken sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in which the semantic similarity between the critical noun phrases (NPs) was manipulated. In addition, the sentences could be spoken fluently, or there could be a repair disfluency in which the reparandum contained information that would be potentially helpful in comprehending the sentence. Results from comprehension question accuracy as well as response times replicated previous experiments in the written domain, showing a robust ORC-SRC difference when the two NPs were similar, but a reduction in the ORC-SRC asymmetry when the two NPs were distinct. However, there was no evidence that the ORC-SRC asymmetry was reduced when the reparandum in a repair disfluency contained useful information, perhaps because ORCs in the disfluent condition overburdened working memory resources.
Recommended Citation
O’Shaughnessy, Claire, "The Project That Claire, uh I Mean the Student Completed: Relative Clauses and Repair Disfluencies" (2023). Honors Theses. 1685.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/honors-theses/1685
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