@inproceedings{xu-futrell-2024-syntactic,
    title = "Syntactic dependency length shaped by strategic memory allocation",
    author = "Xu, Weijie  and
      Futrell, Richard",
    editor = "Hahn, Michael  and
      Sorokin, Alexey  and
      Kumar, Ritesh  and
      Shcherbakov, Andreas  and
      Otmakhova, Yulia  and
      Yang, Jinrui  and
      Serikov, Oleg  and
      Rani, Priya  and
      Ponti, Edoardo M.  and
      Murado{\u{g}}lu, Saliha  and
      Gao, Rena  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Vylomova, Ekaterina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP",
    month = mar,
    year = "2024",
    address = "St. Julian's, Malta",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-affiliations/2024.sigtyp-1.1/",
    pages = "1--9",
    abstract = "Human processing of nonlocal syntactic dependencies requires the engagement of limited working memory for encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. This process creates an evolutionary pressure for language to be structured in a way that keeps the subparts of a dependency closer to each other, an efficiency principle termed dependency locality. The current study proposes that such a dependency locality pressure can be modulated by the surprisal of the antecedent, defined as the first part of a dependency, due to strategic allocation of working memory. In particular, antecedents with novel and unpredictable information are prioritized for memory encoding, receiving more robust representation against memory interference and decay, and thus are more capable of handling longer dependency length. We examine this claim by analyzing dependency corpora of 11 languages, with word surprisal generated from GPT-3 language model. In support of our hypothesis, we find evidence for a positive correlation between dependency length and the antecedent surprisal in most of the languages in our analyses. A closer look into the dependencies with core arguments shows that this correlation consistently holds for subject relations but not for object relations."
}