This article examines the special processing characteristics of head-final relative clauses. As head-final relative clauses superficially resemble other prenominal modifiers such as adjectivals, stative verbs, and adjunctive/complement clauses, their status as a distinct kind has constantly been challenged. We present existing processing evidence to show that head-final relative clauses should ...

This study reconsiders the acquisition of relative clauses based on data from two sentencerepetition tasks. Using materials modeled on the relative constructions of spontaneous child speech, we asked four-year-old Englishand German-speaking children to repeat six different types of relative clauses. Although English and German relative clauses are structurally very different, the results were s...

The resumption phenomenon has attracted the attention of linguists within different frameworks and in various languages. However, this received limited Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), especially relation to Direct Object Relative Clauses (DORCs). There have been a few discussions DORCs disregard can be attributed fundamental reason which is optionality construction particular. By large, interpret...

In two self-paced reading experiments, subject relative clauses (e.g., 'the woman who saw the man') were read faster than object relative clauses ('the woman who the man saw') in Japanese. Previous formulations of working-memory factors do not predict the patterns observed. A preference to complete fragments as object relative clauses indicates that ambiguity and expectation are unlikely to exp...

A controversy in the sentence processing literature regarding relative-clause processing was raised by Hsiao and Gibson’s (2003) study of Chinese relative clauses. Their study suggested that, contrary to the patterns found in all other languages, Chinese relative clauses showed a processing preference for object extractions. This result posed a challenge to sentence processing theories that att...

Several studies have suggested that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have sentence comprehension difficulty in part because of their limited executive resources. However, these assessments confound the executive resources contributing to sentence comprehension with the resources needed for task performance. In the present study, we used a word detection technique that minimizes task deman...