The Time-course of Processing Syntactic Dependencies: Evidence from Eye Movements during Spoken Narratives

The current study used head mounted eyetracking to examine the time course and nature of processing filler-gap relations in wh-questions, and the role of verb argument frame information. Subjects listened to a short narrative while viewing pictures of entities mentioned in the story and answered an auditorily presented question; eye movements in response to these questions were recorded. In Experiment 1, subjects heard wh-questions (e.g., “What did Jody squash the spider with?”), contrasted with yes/no question questions with no gap (e.g., “Did Jody squash a spider with her shoe?”). Results showed evidence of anticipatory gap projection at the verb only for whquestions. In Experiment 2, wh-questions containing a strongly transitive verb used intransitively (e.g., “Who did the mother bear kill for?”) were compared to questions containing an intransitive verb (e.g., “Who did the mother bear die for?”). Verb-argument information was used to constrain hypotheses of possible gap locations. These results provide converging evidence for active on-line resolution of syntactic dependencies mediated by verb argument structure, and introduce an important methodological tool for investigating processes that underlie syntactic dependencies.