Reading‐Time Evidence for Intermediate Linguistic Structure in Long‐Distance Dependencies

Most linguistic theories since Chomsky (1973) have hypothesized that long-distance dependencies crossing multiple clauses are mediated by intermediate structures. This paper provides a new source of evidence for the existence of such intermediate structures: reading times during online sentence comprehension. The experiment presented here compares reading times for two structures involving the long-distance extraction of a wh-filler: (a) a structure in which a clause intervenes between the endpoints of the extraction, and (b) a structure in which a nominalization of the clause intervenes. The logic of the experiment relies on two hypotheses: first, that intermediate structures mediate the relationship between a wh-filler and its θ-role-assigning verb when a clause intervenes between them but not when a nominalization intervenes; and second, that reading times for a word increase as linear distance increases between the word and the position on which it is dependent in the partial structure for the input (Gibson 1998, 2000; Grodner, Watson & Gibson 2000). In combination, these hypotheses predict that reading times at the region in which the verb assigns a θ-role to the wh-filler will be faster in the clausal conditions than in the nominalized conditions, because in the clausal conditions intermediate structure mediate the wh-filler verb dependency and cause it to be more local. This prediction was confirmed.