PROCESSING EMPTY CATEGORIES - A PARALLEL APPROACH

In many current theories of human sentence processing, the mechanisms and principles proposed to account for data related to processing (1) long-distance dependencies and (2) structural ambiguities, such as gar den-path sentences, are independent, despite the fact that deciding wh ether or not to posit a gap is just a special case of ambiguity resolu tion. In this paper we demonstrate how the parallel parsing theory pro posed by Gibson (1991, in press)-which was developed to account for no ngap ambiguity resolution data-also explains a number of gap-positing facts, without additional strategies. In particular, we show how this theory correctly explains filled-object-gap effects and the lack of fi lled-subject-gap effects in English, as well as certain gap-processing effects in Dutch.