Syntax across domains: overlap in global and local structure processing

The research that has been presented in the current dissertation aims to address the recent debate concerning the extent to which structural processing across content domains (language, music, math, and action) might be supported by domain-general resources (Slevc & Okada, 2015). Following the development of novel pitch sequences and an off-line structural processing measure, we found interference during the joint structural processing of sentences and pitch sequences, which suggests that structural processing in both domains is supported by a domain-general pool of (working memory and cognitive control) resources. On the basis of this finding, we investigated to what extent such interactions between the structural processing of linguistic and non-linguistic materials could be found when studying ecologically valid materials. In an EEG study, we found that the event-related potentials (P2, P3, LAN, and P600) which were observed for dispreferred sentential disambiguations could be influenced by structural expectations on the basis of previously disambiguated pitch sequences. In two subsequent structural priming studies, we found that the completion of syntactically (Scheepers et al., 2011) and thematically (Allen et al., 2010) structured sentence beginnings (Scheepers et al., 2011) could be primed by the attachment structure of preceding linguistic, mathematical and pitch sequence materials. Furthermore, we found that similar cross-domain priming effects could be observed on the perception of implicitly structured pitch sequences. These findings thus strongly argue for broad, domain-general interactions in structural processing even when studying more naturalistic processing of ecologically valid materials. We tentatively interpret the current findings as evidence in favour of a domain-general pool of cognitive processing resources supporting structural processing across domains (Kljajevic, 2010; Slevc & Okada, 2014). With regards to our cross domain priming findings, we suggest that our results align with an ‘incremental-procedural’ account of attachment priming (see Scheepers & Sturt, 2014) according to which encountering a complexity in the structural processing of materials might (through a process of error-based implicit learning, Chang et al., 2006) influence the resource allocation during the structural processing of subsequent materials. In this way, our cross domain priming findings can be aligned with the idea of structural complexities processing being supported by domain-general cognitive resources (Slevc & Okada, 2015). At this point, it is important to remark that the results reported in the dissertation should of course be further replicated, and might be generalized to include harmonic processing and action perception as domains of structural processing. Furthermore, the interpretations of the current findings are not fully conclusive, as our studies were mainly guided by the goal of investigating whether there was evidence for interaction in structural processing across domains (showing several primary findings), rather than directly comparing alternative accounts in the interpretation of such interactions. Nevertheless, the research reported in the current dissertation clearly shows that, in relationship to the ongoing discussion on domain-generality of structural processing across domains (Slevc & Okada, 2015), interactions in structural processing across domains can be found when controlling for limitations of previous research (Perruchet & Poulin-Charronnat, 2013), and that those interactions can also be observed in situations that more closely approximate the processing of information from several domains in ‘daily life’. These primary findings suggest that domain-general cognitive processing resources support structural processing across domains, which provides several perspectives for theoretical approaches in psycholinguistics as well as other domains of cognition involving structural processing, such as math, music, and action