CASE-MARKING IN THE PARSING OF COMPLEMENT SENTENCES - EVIDENCE FROM EYE-MOVEMENTS

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.