Second Language Processing ofFiller-Gap Dependencies: Evidence for the Role of Lexical Access (original) (raw)

Sentences that involve direct and indirect object relative clauses contain displaced syntactic constituents (or fillers) that do not appear in their canonical object position following the verb. During real-time comprehension, when the head of such a relative clause is encountered, it has been argued that the human sentence processing mechanism will automatically project a syntactic structure that includes a trace where the displaced element originated as an object of its licensing verb (e.g., Frazier, 1987; Frazier & Fodor, 1978). The referent of the filler, after it is accessed in the lexicon, will be temporarily stored in working memory, until the moment at which this trace (or gap) is encountered later during sentence processing and at which the filler can thus be retrieved from memory and integrated into the structure (e.g., Bever & McElree, 1988; Love & Swinney, 1996; Nicol & Swinney, 1989). Thus, processing a filler-gap dependency involves not only the computation of a moveme...