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Multiple dependencies and the role of the grammar in real-time comprehension1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2009

MATTHEW W. WAGERS  and
COLIN PHILLIPS
MATTHEW W. WAGERS*
Affiliation:
Department of LinguisticsUniversity of California, Santa Cruz
COLIN PHILLIPS*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Neuroscience & Cognitive Science ProgramUniversity of Maryland, College Park
*
Authors' addresses: Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USAmwagers@ucsc.edu
Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, 1401 Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USAcolin@umd.edu
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Abstract

Wh-dependencies are known to be formed rapidly in real-time comprehension. The parser posits the location of gap sites in advance of the bottom-up evidence for missing constituents, and must therefore have a means of deciding when and where to project dependencies. Previous studies have observed that the parser avoids building ungrammatical wh-dependencies, for example, by restricting the search for gap sites from island domains. This paper tests the stronger claim that constraints are not merely respected, but that grammatical knowledge actively prompts the construction of some representations in advance of the input. Three self-paced reading experiments examined patterns of wh-dependency formation in multiple-dependency constructions: obligatory across-the-board (ATB) extraction from coordinated verb phrases, and from optional parasitic gaps in post-verbal adjunct clauses. The key finding is that comprehenders immediately enforce the requirement for extraction from coordinates, and hence actively search for multiple gap sites within a coordinate VP; but they do not search for post-verbal parasitic gaps. This difference cannot be attributed to relative differences in acceptability, as comprehenders rated both of these multiple-gap constructions equally highly, nor can it be explained by general parsing incentives to develop maximal incremental interpretations of partial strings. More plausibly, the difference reflects the deployment of detailed grammatical knowledge in a parser that is motivated to satisfy structural licensing requirements in real time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 395 - 433
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

[1]

The authors acknowledge the support of grants from the National Science Foundation (BSC-0196004) and the Human Frontiers Science Program (RGY-0134). Thanks to Norbert Hornstein, Amy Weinberg, the audience of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (19), and the two anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for helpful discussion and comment.

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