This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...

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 a...

in german, a relative clause is marked by relative pronoun, which agrees withtheir head noun in gender and number. however, relative clauses in farsi arealways introduced by using a conjunction “ke”. this difference could be iranianand german learners when learning languages, german and farsi to confrontdifficulties. the present study focuses on relativisation strategies based ontypological ana...

This article examines how certain types of semantic and discourse context affect the processing of relative clauses which are temporarily ambiguous between a relative clause and a main clause (e.g., "The actress selected by the director ..."). We review recent results investigating local semantic context and temporal context, and we present some new data investigating referential contexts. The ...

Japanese dependency structure is usually represented by relationships between phrasal units called bunsetsus. One of the biggest problems with dependency structure analysis in spontaneous speech is that clause boundaries are ambiguous. This paper describes a method for detecting the boundaries of quotations and inserted clauses and that for improving the dependency accuracy by applying the dete...

Results from two self-paced reading experiments in English are reported in which subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs, respectively) were presented in contexts that support both types of relative clauses (RCs). Object-extracted versions were read more slowly than subject-extracted versions across both experiments. These results are not consistent with a decay-based work...

This study investigates the use of relative clauses in French children's narrative monologues. Narrative texts were collected from French-speaking monolinguals in four age groups (five, seven, ten years and adults). Twenty subjects from each group were asked to tell a story based on a picture book consisting of twenty-four images without text (Frog, Where are you?). Relative constructions were ...

In a local derivational (phase-based) approach to syntax, instances of resumption in German (longdistance) relativization constructions with an empty operator and a complementizer wo (‘where’) must be analyzed in terms of movement. Against this background, these constructions raise three problems for syntactic analysis: (i) a locality (backtracking) problem (‘How can the information that a resu...

In this paper we present some results stemming from a British Academy funded grant,1 the objective of which was to determine the extent of dialect variation in relative clause constructions in Scottish Gaelic and to provide a theoretical explanation for the structures discovered. The more theoretical outcomes of the project are reported in Adger and Ramchand (2002) and Adger and Ramchand (2005)...