A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically compatible with only a proper subpart of the input are sometimes constructed, at least temporarily. Three self-paced reading experiments probed for interference from such locally coherent structures. The first tested for a distracting effect of irrelevant Subject–Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase–Verb Phrase sequences (e.g., The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee) on reading times. The second addressed the question of whether the interference effects can be treated as lexical interference, instead of involving the formation of locally coherent syntactic structures. The third replicated the reading time effects of the first two experiments with grammaticality judgments. We evaluate the dynamical account, comparing it to other approaches that also predict effects of local coherence, and arguing against accounts which rule out the formation of merely locally coherent structures.

This paper investigates the processing of long-distance filler-gap dependencies in Japanese, a strongly head-final language. Two self-paced reading experiments and one sentence completion study show that Japanese readers associate a fronted wh-phrase with the most deeply embedded clause of a multi-clause sentence. Experiment 1 demonstrates this using evidence that readers expect to encounter a scope-marking affix on the verb of an embedded clause in wh-fronting constructions. Experiment 2 shows that the wh-phrase is already associated with the embedded clause before the embedded verb is processed, based on a Japanese counterpart of the Filled Gap Effect (Stowe, 1986). Experiment 3 corroborates these findings in a sentence completion study. These findings clarify the factors responsible for Ôactive fillerÕ effects in processing long-distance dependencies (Crain & Fodor, 1985; Fodor, 1978; Frazier & Clifton, 1989; Stowe, 1986) in ways not possible in head-initial languages. The results provide evidence that the processing of filler-gap dependencies is driven by the need to satisfy thematic role requirements of the fronted phrase, rather than by the need to create a gap as soon as possible. The paper also discusses implications of these findings for theories of reanalysis.

This is the pre-publication manuscript. The published version may slightly differ.

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that, at each point in time, the processor constructs an analysis which is consistent with the grammatical information in the input. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically incompatible with the current input can nevertheless temporarily influence the processor. Three self-paced reading experiments demonstrated the influence of such local structural ambiguities. The first examined