PLAUSIBILITY AND THE PROCESSING OF UNBOUNDED DEPENDENCIES - AN EYE-TRACKING STUDY

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated processing or unbounded depe ndency constructions. Experiment 1 employed sentences like That's the garage/pistol with which the heartless killer shot the man yesterday a fternoon. Readers experienced greater processing difficulty in implaus ible sentences than in plausible sentences immediately after encounter ing the verb shot. this demonstrated that they did not wait until the purported gap location after man before forming the unbounded dependen cy. Experiment 2 considered sentences which locally appear to have an unbounded dependency that turns out to be incorrect. Data from this ex periment demonstrated that readers formed the unbounded dependency imm ediately, even though they had reanalyze later. However, there was no evidence that readers formed this unbounded dependency when it was ren dered ungrammatical by island-constraint information. We argue that th e processor constructs unbounded dependencies in a manner that is maxi mally efficient from the point of view of incremental processing. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.