Parsing WH-constructions: Evidence for on-line gap location

Two experiments investigate how people assign a grammatical meaning to WH-phrases in embedded questions. The first experiment replicates Crain and Fodor's (1985) finding that object NPs take longer to read in a WH-question than in a corresponding declarative sentence, suggesting that people expect not to find an object, presumably because they have associated the object semantic role with the WH-phrase. Experiment 1 also shows that there is no such difficulty at the subject NP, suggesting that the subject semantic role is not associated with the WH-phrase in the same way as the object role. Experiment 2 investigated whether people assign a semantic role to the WH-phrase which cannot be grammatically acceptable; the evidence suggests that people are not prone to make such mistakes.