A method for obtaining measures of local parsing complexity throughout sentences

Efficient techniques that give measures of local parsing complexity throughout sentences are needed to study the detailed course of sentence parsing. A new technique, the Continuous Lexical Decision Task, was tested to determine the whether it is sensitive to differences in local parsing complexity throughout sentences. Experiment 1 demonstrated that subjects performing the task treat sentences as sentences. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the task is sensing to on-line syntactic processing. Results showed not only that Object relatives are harder to process than Subject relatives, but also that parsing complexity is increased at the gap in Object relatives and remains increased for the next couple of words. The results suggest that the difficulty of Object relatives in comparison to Subject relatives lies in the assignment of the head as the filler of the gap.

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