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Psychological reality of syntactic traces

Available eye-tracking data have been seen as providing support for on-line gap filling during comprehension of object wh-questions. Based on the reactivation of the object NP referent (e.g., the girl) at the verb position in Who did the boy kiss that day at school?,it was argued that listeners signal a post-verbal trace of wh-movement, and thus use syntactic dependencies to identify the referent of the wh-filler (Dickey, Choy, & Thompson, 2007; Dickey & Thompson, 2009). In English, however, the subject NP (the boy) must be overtly mentioned in object wh-questions, which makes virtually impossible to identify the reason of the object NP reactivation at the verb: it could be driven either by the syntactic trace of the displaced constituent or by a contextually oriented processing strategy: an overt subject NP cannot be associated with a wh-filler, thus the referential choice is made in favor of another referent involved in an action.

Exploiting flexible word order and case marking of Russian, we carried out an eye-tracking-while-listening experiment to disentangle the effects of syntax and context. 36 native Russian speakers were assigned to either of the two stimuli lists and listened to 20 experimental and 20 filler stories presented in a quasi-randomized order. The first three sentences of an experimental story introduced a transitive action, the two critical referents involved in it and two distractor referents: One day the girl and the boy were walking at school. Suddenly, the boy kissed the girl. The teacher was very surprised. The story was finalized by a wh-question in either of the two conditions:

  1. Kogo         malchik    potseloval v shkole?

             who-ACC  boy-NOM  kissed        at school (‘Who did the boy kiss at school?’)

  1. Kto            devochku  potseloval  v shkole?

        who-NOM  girl-ACC     kissed        at school (‘Who kissed the girl at school?’)

Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they viewed panels with four drawings depicting referents of a story (two critical – the boy and the girl, and two distractors – the teacher and the school). The offline behavioral task required to answer the question at the end by fixating the relevant picture for a few seconds.

The data have been analysed and the paper is to follow.
Laboratory members working on this project: Olga Dragoy, Anna Laurinavichute, Mariya Ivanova, Svetlana Kuptsova.

This project is supported by research grant from Russian Humanitarian Scientific Foundation (RHSF) №12-04-00371а.

 


 

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