Mj. Traxler et Mj. Pickering, CASE-MARKING IN THE PARSING OF COMPLEMENT SENTENCES - EVIDENCE FROM EYE-MOVEMENTS, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology, 49(4), 1996, pp. 991-1004
An eye-tracking experiment investigated the role of case-marking in pa
rsing. We manipulated the case of pronouns in reduced complement sente
nces like I recognized you and your family would be unhappy here and I
recognized she and her family, would be unhappy here, in which the no
minative pronoun she immediately disambiguates the sentences, in contr
ast to the ambiguous you. The nominative pronoun she disambiguates the
sentence because I recognised she is ungrammatical, and thus she and
her family must be the subject of an embedded sentence and not the NP-
object of the preceding verb. Subjects took longer to read she and her
family than you and your family during initial processing. The patter
n reversed at the disambiguating phrase would be. Unambiguous control
sentences containing the complementizer that did not produce case-mark
ing effects. These results demonstrate very rapid effects of case-mark
ing on parsing. Either case information is used immediately, or it is
employed after an extremely short delay. We discuss implications for c
urrent theories of parsing.