Locality Effect on the Processing of Gap-Filler Dependency: An On-Line Study of Japanese Relative Clauses

摘要

In Japanese, previous studies observed a lack of locality effects in integrating a referential NP and a verb (Nakatani and Gibson, 2008, 2010) while the processing costs due to distance have been observed on NPI dependencies (Nakatani, 2009) and wh-Q dependencies (Ono and Nakatani, 2010, 2014). The current study examined a locality effect on the processing of Japanese relative clauses. By adding a linear distance between a gap and a filler, a self-paced reading experiments were conducted. Although the results did not show a strong locality effect, marginally longer reading times were observed when object-extracted relative clauses were intervened by wh-interrogatives.