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Processing empty categories: A parallel approach

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Abstract

In many current theories of human sentence processing, the mechanisms and principles proposed to account for data related to processing (1) long-distance dependencies and (2) structural ambiguities, such as garden-path sentences, are independent, despite the fact that deciding whether or not to posit a gap is just a special case of ambiguity resolution. In this paper we demonstrate how the parallel parsing theory proposed by Gibson (1991, in press)—which was developed to account for nongap ambiguity resolution data—also explains a number of gap-positing facts, without additional strategies. In particular, we show how this theory correctly explains filled-object-gap effects and the lack of filled-subject-gap effects in English, as well as certain gap-processing effects in Dutch.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience, The Salk Institute, 92037, La Jolla, California

    Gregory Hickok

  2. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 02139, Cambridge, Massachusetts

    Carson T. Schütze

  3. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, E10-034C, MIT, 02139, Cambridge, Massachusetts

    Edward Gibson

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  1. Edward Gibson
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  2. Gregory Hickok
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  3. Carson T. Schütze
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Gibson, E., Hickok, G. & Schütze, C.T. Processing empty categories: A parallel approach. J Psycholinguist Res 23, 381–405 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02143946

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