9.2 “The fundamental things apply As time goes by”
9.4 The Role of Presentation Modality
cality effects that manifest in increased reading times in the following regions. On the one hand, this indicates that both syntactic structures adversely affect sentence processing. On the other hand, the data also show expectation-based effects. For example, reading times of the matrix verb differed strongly in-between the condi-tions. However, the data for the region MV yield both locality- and anti-locality effects. Those findings fit to other reports that suggest a co-occurrence of locality-and anti-locality in sentence processing. The data of Experiment 5 suggest that beneficial effects might occur up to a certain length or a certain level of sentence complexity. However, if this level of complexity has been crossed, beneficial effects seem to dissolve. Further additional length increases complexity which manifests in locality effects.
Considerations of a co-occurrence of both expectations-based facilitation and distance-based locality effects also fits results of Experiment 6. It is suggested that complex and infrequent sentence constructions are more likely to become subject to locality than simple structures which often might benefit from additional length. Experiment 6 reveals clear-cut locality effects. However, a tendency in the data suggests that some critical and complex structures (ungrammatical sentences and garden-path sentences) are more sensitive to additional length than others.
Previous findings have shown that those conditions are more error prone than other conditions. Thus, the data support considerations that complex structures are more likely to be adversely affected by additional length than simple structures.
Furthermore, another important finding reported in this thesis concerns the experimental self-paced reading paradigm. Unexpected results of Experiment 4 indicate that non-linguistic information significantly affected the parsing process.
As discussed in chapter 7, the information about the number of words per sentence (which was unwillingly provided by the number of underlines on the screen) had a significant impact on the participants’ parsing processes. Modifying the exper-imental design of Experiment 4 in the follow-up Experiment 5 resulted in a lack of unwanted length effects. This supports the hypothesis that unwillingly pro-vided non-linguistic information is the underlying source of the significant and unwanted length effects.
9.4 The Role of Presentation Modality
The final core question of this thesis was concerned with effects of presentation modality on sentence processing. A wide range of studies from the list learning lit-erature concordantly report a superiority effect of auditory presented information.
Results show that visually presented items are recalled less accurate than lists that were presented auditory. As discussed above, this phenomenon is found in vari-ety of studies with letters, words or numbers. Some hypotheses suggest that the
specialized subcomponent of the working memory framework which is responsi-ble for language processing, bases on a phonological code. Thus, a recoding of visual information into this phonological code yields a processing disadvantage compared to already presented auditory material.
The final study in this thesis investigated, if complex cognitive tasks, such as sentence processing, also reveal the modality effect. Indeed, the main findings of Experiment 7 show a superiority effect of auditory presentation over visually pre-sented material. Those findings suggest that the effect reported from studies with unrelated lists can also be found in experiments on sentence processing. It seems that complex cognitive tasks are observably sensitive to presentation modality.
However, in contrast to predictions the data only partly show that critical sen-tences are more sensitive to presentation modality than other sentence conditions.
First, ungrammatical sentences are not affected by modality at all. Second, acc-initial ambiguous sentences only show some numerical advantage of auditory sen-tences over visual sensen-tences.
Altogether, the results of Experiment 7 reveal a superiority effect of the audi-tory presentation modality for complex cognitive tasks. However, it is suggested that future work investigates the issue of modality effects in sentence processing.
The results of experiments work presented in this dissertation yield some valu-able and interesting findings that contribute to a range of long-lasting, central and current questions in psycholinguistic research.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 179 a
Experimental Methods A
All experiments presented in this thesis were run in thePSYCHOLINGUISTIC LAB
-ORATORY of the University of Konstanz. In this laboratory, experiments on lan-guage processing in German are run all-year-round. All subjects participating in the various studies are students with German as their native language who are recruited from the campus community. Participation in the experiments is re-warded with either a one hour credit (Versuchspersonenstunde) or a payment of 5-7 Euro per hour. Research priorities investigated in the laboratory focus on cur-rently debated aspects of speech processing from a syntactic point of view. The experiments make use of a wide range of experimental methods in both visual and auditory input. Self-paced reading studies (SPR), speeded grammaticality judg-ment tasks (SGJ) are amongst the used methodologies. All experijudg-ments in this doctoral thesis were accomplished with either the self-paced reading paradigm or the speeded grammaticality judgment paradigm. Both experimental tasks will be discussed briefly in this appendix.