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Three eye movement experiments investigated the processing of the syntactic ambiguity in strings such as the information that the health department provided , where the that -clause can be either a relative clause (RC) or the start of a nominal complement clause (CC; the information that the health department provided a cure ). The experiments tested the prediction that comprehenders should avoid the RC analysis because it involves an unforced filler-gap dependency. Readers showed difficulty upon disambiguation toward the RC analysis, and showed facilitated processing of the ambiguous material itself when the CC analysis was available; both patterns suggest rapid initial adoption of the CC analysis in preference to the RC analysis. The strength of the bias of a specific head noun (e.g., information ) to appear with a CC did not modulate these effects, nor were these effects reliably modulated by the tendency of an ambiguous string to be completed off-line as a CC or an RC. These results add to the evidence that structural principles guide the processing of filler-gap dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wh-in-situ constructions in Mandarin Chinese, as opposed to their English counterparts that front wh-phrases to the beginning of the sentence, have the same word order as regular non-wh declaratives. We argue that despite their surface word order, processing wh-in-situ constructions involves constructing a covert non-local syntactic dependency between the in-situ wh-phrase and a higher scope position at a clause boundary, leading to behavioral patterns similar to those associated with the processing of overt dependencies. In two comprehension experiments, we showed that the process of linking an in-situ wh-phrase and its scope position induces a similarity-based memory interference effect if another clause boundary position intervenes. In addition, a set of sentence completion studies also showed that the production of wh-in-situ constructions is heavily modulated by the increased working memory burden that results from planning and maintaining a non-local dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]