Subjacency as a processing phenomenon

Abstract In this study we investigated the hypothesis that standard subjacency effects in so-called “wh-islands” are not necessarily due to an innate syntactic constraint, i.e. a problem of language competence, but rather to limits on the human Sentence processor, i.e. a problem of performance. We did so by gathering global acceptability judgements and by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in response to both yes/no- and wh-questions containing embedded that-, if- and wh-clauses. The embedding of any one of these clause types within a yes/no-question typically results in a well-formed sentence. The well-formedness of wh-questions, on the other hand, depends in large part on the type of embedded clause into which a syntactic dependency is formed: dependencies into embedded that-clauses are usually considered grammatical, while dependencies into embedded if-clauses are considered marginal and dependencies into wh-clauses (“wh-islands”) ungrammatical. We predicted that these differences in gramm...

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