Pickering and Barry's recent argument against the existence of empty categories (ECs) in human sentence processing is disputed. It is argued here that ECs may still play a linking role between thematic role assigners and wh-phrases. One possible parsing algorithm is given that accounts for Pickering and Barry's data. (28 references) (Author/LB)

Results from an English acceptability-rating experiment are presented that demonstrate that people find doubly nested relative-clause structures just as acceptable when only two verb phrases are included instead of the grammatically required three. Three possible accounts of the results are considered. (Author/VWL)

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are…