The role of experience in syntactic processing: a critical view from the linguistics building = El papel de la experiencia en el procesamiento sintáctico: una visión crítica desde la lingüística

Resumen

Linguists with an interest in psycholinguistic research on the processing of language often feel concerned that psycholinguistic experiments truly reflect important aspects of the nature of language and not artefactualdimensions of the methodologies used in them. In this paper I intend to argue that one of the main theories of language comprehension, Tuning, is flawed precisely because the theory has virtually no connection with the world of linguistics. If my view is correct, information about language obtained within the Tuning paradigm is therefore unlikely to reflect truly significant aspects of the nature of language. Tuning is premised on the role played by frequency in many cognitive domains, including the processing of language. It claims that ambiguous sentences are processed initially by preferring more frequent syntactic trees over less frequent ones. A prerequisite to the verificability of the theory is that its corpus analyses be wellfounded. Another is that the theory spell out precisely what counts as a segment subject to frequency effects. I intend to argue that these two prerequisites are not adequately controlled by the proponents of the model.