Mj. Traxler et Mj. Pickering, PLAUSIBILITY AND THE PROCESSING OF UNBOUNDED DEPENDENCIES - AN EYE-TRACKING STUDY, Journal of memory and language, 35(3), 1996, pp. 454-475
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.