The use of syntactic information in filling gaps

Abstract

Two sentence-comprehension time experiments replicated and extended previously reported research indicating that readers initially make a quick, heuristic assignment of fillers to gaps in temporarily ambiguous sentences such as “Who did John beg to sing?” and “Who did John beg to sing for?” The Most Recent Filler heuristic readers seemed to adopt made the former “distant filler” sentence harder to comprehend than the latter “recent filler” sentence. Readers did not in general use all available sources of information in making this assignment. In particular, they usually delayed their use of verb control information so that substituting the unambiguous-control verbs “force” or “begin” for “beg” did not eliminate the distant filler inferiority. the experiments counter some criticisms that have been made of the previously reported research. The possibility that readers delay using an interesting natural category of information was raised, and its implications for the mental grammar were considered.