Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

(joint work in collaboration with Adrian Staub (UMASS), Caterina Donati (Paris Diderot) and Carlo Cecchetto (UNIMIB-CNRS Paris)

Filler-gap dependencies have been a central topic in sentence processing research. These involve the movement of an element (the filler) from a location at which it typically receives its thematic role (the gap). Most previous psycholinguistic research has investigated the process by which the gap is located once a filler has been identified. However, the question of how the processor determines that a filler-gap dependency is present has received relatively little attention.

By means of a set of eye-tracking reading studies, we demonstrated that readers have a strong tendency to analyze the ambiguous that-clause in, e.g., The claim that the President made… as a nominal complement clause rather than as a relative clause. By means of a series of acceptability and self-paced reading studies, we also investigated temporarily ambiguous structures in Italian and in French that only differ with respect to the presence/absence of the filler-gap dependency.

We interpret our results as evidence in favor of the first clause of the Minimal Chain Principle (de Vincenzi, 1991), which states that filler-gap dependencies should not be posited except when necessary, ultimately supporting structural parsing principle during language processing.