Sentence comprehension and relative pronouns

Abstract

Doubly self-embedded sentences, differing only in whether the relative pronouns were present or deleted, were presented to two groups of Ss who were required to respond to a word beginning with a particular letter in each sentence and to paraphrase the sentence. The results of both the phoneme monitor task and the paraphrase task indicated that comprehension was better when the relative pronouns were present than when they were deleted. These results are consistent with earlier results for the paraphrase task but are not consistent with earlier results for the phoneme monitor task. Possible reasons for the inconsistency were considered. It was concluded that the phoneme monitor task does reflect comprehension difficulty in a manner consistent with the paraphrase task and that deleting the relative pronouns does make comprehending self-embedded sentences more difficult. © 1970 Psychonomic Society, Inc.