The processing complexity of English relative clauses
نویسندگان
چکیده
Sentences that contain non-local dependencies between words have long been known to cause comprehension difficulty, relative to sentences where all the dependencies are local. Relative clause (RC) structures have been used extensively to evaluate hypotheses about the source of these complexity effects because different word order configurations can be compared while keeping the words the same and the meaning similar across conditions. The most frequently contrasted RC structures are subject-extracted and object-extracted RCs (SRCs and ORCs), the two most common types of RCs crosslinguistically (Keenan & Comrie, 1977). For example, consider the English RCs modifying the subject noun phrase (NP) “the reporter” in (1):
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