Assessing Intervention Effects in Sentence Processing: Object Relatives vs. Subject Control.

ABSTRACT: Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. Under Grillo's (2009) Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality) and the sentence processing system. Specifically, intervention of the subject DP in the movement dependency is expected to generate a minimality violation whenever processing limitations render the moved object underspecified, resulting in compromised comprehension. In the present study, assuming Generalized Minimality, we compared the processing of object relatives with the processing of subject control in ditransitives, which, like object relatives, instantiates a syntactic dependenc

SUBMITTER: Delgado J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7884622 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature