AUTHOR=Tollan Rebecca , Palaz Bilge 

TITLE=Subject Gaps Revisited: Complement Clauses and Complementizer-Trace Effects

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=12

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.658364

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.658364

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>This study investigates how filler-gap dependencies associated with subject position are formed in online sentence comprehension. Since <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B6">Crain and Fodor (1985)</xref>, “filled-gap” studies have provided evidence that the parser actively seeks to associate a <italic>wh-filler</italic> with a gap in direct object position of a sentence wherever possible; the evidence that this same process applies for subject position, is, however, more limited (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B21">Stowe, 1986</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B15">Lee, 2004</xref>). We examine the processing of complement clauses, finding that <italic>wh</italic> dependency formation is actively attempted at embedded subject position (e.g., <italic>Kate</italic> in <italic>Who did Lucy think Kate could drive us home to?</italic>), unless, however, the embedded clause contains a complementizer (e.g., <italic>Who did Lucy think <underline>that</underline> Kate</italic> … <italic>.?</italic>). The absence of the dependency formation in the latter case demonstrates that the complementizer-trace effect (cf., <italic><sup>∗</sup>Who did Lucy think that could drive us home to mom?</italic>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B16">Perlmutter, 1968</xref>) is, like syntactic island constraints (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B19">Ross, 1967</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B14">Keshev and Meltzer-Asscher, 2017</xref>), immediately operative in online structure building.</p>