Frequenzeffekte in der Satzverarbeitung. Wie Erfahrung den Erwerb und die Verarbeitung von Sprache beeinflusst

Distributional properties of language and the implicit acquisition of knowledge about these properties influences human language processing. Connectionist approaches of sentence processing provide a paradigm that places the role of frequency at the core of psycholinguistic reasoning. We introduce this paradigm and some of its consequences by focusing on simple recurrent networks (Elman 1990) and the processing differences of relative clauses (MacDonald/Christiansen 2002). An effect of frequency that is predicted by connectionist models–but not by classical, computational symbol processing models–is the interference of so-called ›local syntactic coherences‹: embedded sequences that have–if they occur in isolation–a particular interpretation. However, embedded in a complex sentence, this interpretation is incorrect because the preceding context of the global sentence renders it ungrammatical. It has been shown in both reading- and visual world studies that the local, syntactically invalid analysis of such sequences is in fact processed, interferes with the globally correct analysis, and can even influence interpretational processes. This is remarkable since such effects seem to be in conflict with fundamental assumptions about economical language processing. In addition, we show that the amount of ›distraction‹ that the local sequence causes depends on the tendency of the local sequence towards the local analysis, where this tendency was measured by examining corpus data. We take these effects as strong evidence in favour of processing accounts that do not take effects of distributional properties in processing as mere phenomena of ›performance‹ but rather as results of the fundamental mechanisms and processes language acquisition and processing are built on.