GRAMMATICAL CONSTRAINTS IN SYNTACTIC PROCESSING, SENTENCE-MATCHING EXPERIMENTS ON GERMAN

In psycholinguistics, there is an ongoing debate over whether empty categories are freely generated by Move a and then filtered out by grammatical constraints on empty categories, or whether illicit representations are never generated in the first place. One central line of evidence for the overgenerate-and-filter view derives from the sentence matching task which shows strong effects of local grammatical violations but no effects of non-local ones. This paper presents results from sentence matching experiments on German to investigate how grammatical constraints on empty categories are implemented in the parser. We found that ungrammatical sentences involving agreement errors, illegal null subjects and verb placement errors in embedded clauses yielded significantly longer reaction times than the control sentences, but that Verb-second violations were cost-free in the sentence matching task. This finding provides new evidence for the overgenerate-and-filter view. Specifically, we will argue that sentence matching is accomplished on the basis of a representation which does not include operator-variable binding. © 1995, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.