We present experimental support for the view that fine-grained statistical information may play a crucial role in the processing of centre-embedded linguistic structure. Using both offline and online methods, we show that the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses is influenced by the frequency of co-occurrence of the word combinations (chunks) forming the clause. We use materials tha...

In the present research we aim to determine whether relative clauses are successful in distinguishing Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) from their typically developing peers. Ninetheen preschool-aged children with SLI participated in the study. They were matched to ninetheen typically developing (TD) children on the basis of the age. Children were tested by means...

Anterior negativities obtained when a grammatical rule is violated may reflect highly automatic first-pass parsing processes, the detection of a morphosyntactic mismatch, and/or the inability to assign the incoming word to the current phrase structure. However, for some theorists these negativities rather reflect some aspect of working memory processes. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) obt...

Recently there has been a lot of interest in testing the processing predictions of a specific top-down parser for Minimalist grammars (Stabler, 2013). Most of this work relies on memory-based difficulty metrics that relate the shape of the parse tree to processing behavior. We show that none of the difficulty metrics proposed so far can explain why subject relative clauses are more easily proce...