One of the most replicated findings in neurolinguistic literature on syntax is the increase of hemodynamic activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) in response to object relative (OR) clauses compared to subject relative clauses. However, behavioral studies have shown that ORs are primarily only costly when similarity-based interference is involved and recently, Leiken and Pylkkänen (...

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts ...

HPSG accounts of filler-gap dependencies hold considerable potential for explaining the cross-linguistic variation in unbounded dependency constructions (UDCs), specifically filler-gap dependencies. This potential comes from the SLASH specifications that are posited in all nodes along the extraction path (the path between filler and gap). However, as Hukari and Levine (1994, 1995, 1996) have ob...

This article explores the construction of filler-gap dependencies in Chinese possessor relative clauses (PRCs), which are different from typical relative clauses (RCs) considered in the literature because Chinese PRCs contain no overt missing arguments (i.e. gaps). As Chinese RCs are prenominal, the gaps precede the head noun fillers. It has been suggested that when the gaps are close to the fi...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants processed case-unambiguous German subject and object WH-questions with either a long or a short distance between the WH-filler and its gap. A sustained left anterior negativity was observed for object questions with long filler-gap distance but not for short object questions. This negativity was modulated by individual diffe...

This study examined the processing of two types of Japanese causative cleft constructions (subject-gap vs. object-gap) by conducting an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment to clarify the processing mechanism of long-distance dependencies. The results demonstrated that the subject-gap constructions elicited larger P600 effects compared with object-gap constructions. Based on these fin...

1 Introduction Decades of psycholinguistic research have witnessed a sustained interest in whether syntactic island constraints are active during online processing the study of syntactic islands seeks to identify environments in which filler-gap dependencies are banned. But to these generalizations, there are, of course, exceptions. One of the more resilient island constraints is Ross's (1967) ...