This paper presents new experimental evidence on the relevance of feature mismatch between the head noun and the embedded noun in the comprehension of relative clauses. Exp. 1 shows that number mismatch determines an amelioration of both subjectand object-extracted relatives in English children. Exp. 2 shows that animacy mismatch per se does not play a role in German but 4-year-olds show a freq...

We tested the predictions of Dependency Locality Theory (DLT), a theory of linguistic processing complexity, against reading time data extracted from a large eye-tracking corpus. DLT predicts differences in processing complexity for subject and object relative clauses. We found elevated reading times on two distinct regions of these relative clauses, in line with the complexity effects predicte...

Processing asymmetries between subjectand object-extracted relative clauses (RCs) have been reported in various languages. This paper examines whether locality or one’s experience of canonical thematic patterns better predicts the processing of head-final RCs by manipulating thematic patterns in the contexts. Two self-paced reading experiments of relative clauses preceded by contexts were condu...