Why the English Easiest Type Became the Hardest in Russian, or Russian Adults’ Comprehension of before and after sentences

Why the English Easiest Type Became the Hardest in Russian, or Russian Adults’ Comprehension of before and after Sentences* Olga Fedorova Department of Linguistics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory, Moscow 119991, Russia olga.fedorova@msu.ru Abstract. Thirty four Russian speaking adults were tested for their comprehension of four complex adverbial sentence types expressing the temporal order of events. Three hypotheses put forward in the literature and tested in English state respectively that: (i) adverbial clause placement, (ii) conjunction choice, and (iii) order of mention effect on participants’ adverbial sentences comprehension. The results of the study demonstrated that none of the three hypotheses were relevant for Russian material. A new explanation was proposed. Keywords: psycholinguistics, language comprehension, working memory, complex adverbial sentences, Russian. * The work reported in this paper was supported by a grant #08-04-00165а from the RGNF and by a grant #09-07- 00366a from the RFFI. Copyright 2010 by Olga Fedorova 1 Introduction Comprehension of four English sentence types expressing the temporal order of events, as in example (1a-d) below, has been studied in children acquiring language (Clark 1971; Amidon and Carey 1972), aphasic adults (Ansell and Flowers 1982; Sasanuma and Kamio 1976), and normal adults (Clark and Clark 1968; Smith and McMahon 1970). These constructions can be associated with three variables at a time: (i) syntax - the adverbial clause precedes (1a, c, hereafter designated as ‘Sub-Main’ sentence) or follows (1b, d, ‘Main-Sub’ sentence) the main clause; (ii) semantics – adverb before (1a, d, hereafter designated as ‘Before1’ and ‘Before2’ respectively) or adverb after (1b, c, ‘After1’ and ‘After2’ respectively) is used; and (iii) pragmatics – the order of mention of the events in a sentence may coincide with the order of occurrence in the real world, (1c, d, OOM sentences), or may not coincide (1a, b, NOOM sentences). (1) a. Before the boy runs, the girl jumps. b. The boy runs after the girl jumps. c. After the girl jumps, the boy runs. d. The girl jumps before the boy runs. With respect to syntax, Clark and Clark (1968) argued that ‘Main-Sub’ sentences (right- branching with conjunction embedded) could be considered transformationally simpler than ‘Sub-Main’ sentences (left-branching with conjunction preposed). Some early experiments (Clark and Clark 1968; Smith and McMahon 1970) have really shown that on a sentence verbatim recall task normal adults made significantly fewer errors remembering the sense of ‘Main-Sub’ sentences, as in (1b, d), than of ‘Sub-Main’ sentences, as in (1a, c). However, PACLIC 24 Proceedings 373 studies of normal adults (Smith and McMahon 1970), kindergarten- and school-age children (Clark 1971; Natsopoulos and Abadzi 1986), and aphasics with relatively preserved auditory comprehension (Ansell and Flowers 1982) indicated that on a sentence comprehension task clause order did not significantly affect the comprehension accuracy. As for semantics, Bever (1970) proposed that any sentence with before is easier to understand than any sentence with after. The hypothesis arises from the combination of two general principles of comprehension. The first principle states that the assertion of a sentence is …

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