Maintenance cost in the processing of subject-verb dependencies

Published Jun 2022 Although research in sentence comprehension has suggested that processing long-distance dependencies involves maintenance between the elements that form the dependency, studies on maintenance of long-distance subject–verb (SV) dependencies are scarce. The few relevant studies have delivered mixed results using self-paced reading or phoneme-monitoring tasks. In the current study, we used eye tracking during reading to test whether maintaining a long-distance SV dependency results in a processing cost on an intervening adverbial clause. In Experiment 1, we studied this question in Spanish and found that both go-past reading times and regressions out of an adverbial clause to the previous regions were significantly increased when the clause interrupts a SV dependency compared to when the same clause doesn’t interrupt this dependency. We then replicated these findings in English (Experiment 2), observing significantly increased go-past reading times on a clause interrupting a SV dependency. The current study provides the first eye-tracking data showing a maintenance cost in the processing of SV dependencies cross-linguistically. Sentence comprehension models should account for the maintenance cost generated by SV dependency processing, and future research should focus on the nature of the maintained representation. This research was partially funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Agencia Estatal de Investigación & Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional Grants PSI2015-65694-P, and RTI2018-096311-B-I00 to Nicola Molinaro, and RYC-2017–22015 and FFI2016-76432-P_LAMPT to Simona Mancini; by Eusko Jaurlaritza Grants PI_2016_1_0014 to Nicola Molinaro, PRE_2018_2_0074 and EP_2018_1_0042 to Bojana Ristic; and by Agencia Estatal de Investigación’s Severo Ochoa excellence program Grant SEV2015– 0490 to the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language.