Syntactic analysis in sentence comprehension: effects of dependency types and grammatical constraints

This paper presents three experiments on the parsing of Italian wh-questions that manipulate the wh-type (who vs. which-N) and the wh extraction site (main clause, dependent clause with or without complementizer). The aim of these manipulations is to see whether the parser is sensitive to the type of dependencies being processed and whether the processing effects can be explained by a unique processing principle, the minimal chain principle (MCP; De Vincenzi, 1991). The results show that the parser, following the MCP, prefers structures with fewer and less complex chains. In particular: (1) There is a processing advantage for the wh-subject extractions, the structures with less complex chains; (2) there is a processing dissociation between the who and which questions; (3) the parser respects the principle that governs the well-formedness of the empty categories (ECP).