Although a large literature demonstrates that object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well as how best to explain these effects. An eye-tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017)…

Previous research has given inconsistent evidence about whether familiar metonyms are more difficult to process than literal expressions. In 2 eye-tracking-while-reading experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the difficulty associated with processing metonyms would depend on sentence structure. Experiment 1 examined comprehension of familiar…

Previous work has suggested that the difficulty normally associated with processing an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) compared to a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) is increased when the head noun phrase (NP1) is animate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is inanimate, compared to the reverse animacy configuration. Two eye-tracking…

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was…

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence …

A series of self-paced reading time experiments was performed to assess how characteristics of noun phrases (NPs) contribute to the difference in processing difficulty between object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Structural semantic characteristics of the NP in the embedded clause (definite vs. indefinite and definite vs. generic) did…