Paper

Interference Predicts Locality: Evidence from an SOV language

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Abstract

Locality and Interference are two mechanisms which are attested to drive sentence comprehension. The relationship between them remains unclear---are they alternative explanations or do they operate independently? To answer this question, we test the hypothesis that in Hindi, interference effects (measured by semantic similarity and case markers) significantly predict locality effects (modelled using dependency length quantifying distance between syntactic heads and their dependents) within a sentence, while controlling for expectation-based measures and discourse givenness. Using data from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB), we validate the stated hypothesis. We demonstrate that sentences with longer dependency length consistently have semantically similar preverbal dependents, more case markers, greater syntactic surprisal, and violate intra-sentential givenness considerations. Overall, our findings point towards the conclusion that locality effects are reducible to broader memory interference effects rather than being distinct manifestations of locality in syntax. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the theories of interference.

Keywords: psycholinguistics, Hindi, interference, dependency locality

How to Cite:

Ranjan, S., Agarwal, S. & Rajkumar, R., (2024) “Interference Predicts Locality: Evidence from an SOV language”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 7(1), 240–256. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.2149