Arabic Language Processing

My primary research interest lies in exploring the question of what makes some sentences more difficult to process than others, and why. My research investigates this question within the context of existing sentence processing theories, including memory- and expectation-based theories, and additionally tests how good-enough/noisy-channel processing contributes to misinterpretations in low-frequency structures. Previous research on this topic has largely focused on Indo European languages, and my research takes steps toward diversifying existing literature by studying Standard Arabic, an under-studied language that exhibits typological features that are also under-represented in psycholinguistic research.

My preliminary work in this area tested memory- and expectation-based processing theories in Arabic relative clauses through a self-paced reading task. The results of this work, which was accepted for publication and presentation at CogSci 2022, demonstrated support for expectation-based theories of sentence processing; however, our results raised new questions about good-enough/noisy-channel processing in Arabic object relative clauses.

My future work will further test patterns of Arabic language processing through a series of eye-tracking tasks. I plan to further investigate contributions of memory limitations and violated expectations to overall processing difficulty, then test the tradeoff of input and statistical expectations in sentence interpretation.

Some sentences are hard to read, and we don’t fully understand why. Memory-based and expectation-based constraints both attempt to explain sentence processing difficulties, and decades of sentence processing literature have found evidence in support of both theories. We further investigate theories of sentence processing by exploring subject- and object-extracted relative clause processing in Standard Arabic. We conducted a self-paced reading task and found that SRCs are easier to process than ORCs in Arabic, in line with expectation-based theories. A follow-up analysis of comprehension question answers revealed that when suggested with the possibility of a noisy interpretation, readers preferentially accept an SRC interpretation over an ORC interpretation. Our future research will explore these findings and test the threshold for acceptance of noisy interpretations.

References

2022