Antecedent priming at trace positions in Japanese long-distance scrambling

We report the results from three cross-modal lexical decision experiments investigating antecedent priming effects in Japanese. In the first two experiments we examined antecedent reactivation at the preverbal trace position in long-distance scrambling sentences. We found an interaction between the participants' working memory (WM) span and antecedent priming. For the high span group, the magnitude of antecedent priming at the trace position was significantly larger than at the earlier control position; for the low span group, on the other hand, there was no such difference. In a third experiment, we examined whether similar reactivation effects could be observed for argument expressions that are not base-generated adjacent to the verb. Contrary to scrambled objects, subject noun phrases (NPs) in canonically ordered sentences were not reactivated at the preverbal test position in either of the two participant groups. We argue that the priming effect observed in the high span group supports a trace-based account of long-distance scrambling. The degree of complexity of the experimental sentences was such that they exceeded the memory span of the low span group. We conclude that argument traces access their antecedents irrespective of the position of their subcategorizers.