Quantifying Processing Difficulty in Human Language Processing

One goal common to human sentence processing theories is to develop a crosslinguistically applicable account of human parsing processes. There is much empirical evidence consistent with such theories, based on experiments involving diverse languages such as English, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, and German, among others. However, processing facts for many other languages are yet to be determined, and it is still unknown how such cross-linguistic theories fare when their predictions are applied to these other languages. Hindi1 is a particularly interesting language for this purpose; although much is known about Hindi syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc., currently there exists almost no experimentally 1Hindi, also known as Urdu, or Hindi-Urdu, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in South Asia; it has about 424 million speakers in India (source: 1991 Census of India, www.censusindia.net), and about 10 million in Pakistan (source: www.sil.org). Although Urdu and Hindi use different scripts, and even though political pressures have resulted in an increasingly divergent lexicon, the syntax is essentially indistinguishable. Accordingly, the present research is likely to be equally relevant to Urdu as to Hindi.