An Active Gap Strategy in the Processing of Filler-Gap Dependencies in Chinese

This study investigates how filler-gap relations are processed on-line in Chinese, in constructions where the relation is driven by the gap rather than by the filler. The specific issue is whether there is an Active Gap Strategy analogous to the Active Filler Strategy that has been well-documented by data from English, Italian and other languages. Results of a self-paced word-by-word reading experiment on Mandarin Chinese indicate that when a gap is encountered first, and a possible filler then presents itself, the parser prefers to adopts that potential filler without waiting to see whether there are other or better alternatives later in the sentence. This is one of several on-line phenomena that would follow from an Active Gap Strategy.