Use your headedness: An exercise in psycholinguistic exploitation1

Abstract

Psycholinguistic research can benefit from variations in headedness that create novel types of ambiguity, raising processing issues not previously studied. Our experiments exploit the mixed headedness of Mandarin Chinese to explore the interplay between phrase structure assignment and empty category interpretation. An empty category (EC) may be interpreted via discourse (pro) or control (PRO) or binding (trace). EC differences are typically accompanied by phrase structure differences (main complement relative clause). Thus, on-line sentence processing can be subject to both EC interpretation pressures and structure-building pressures. Chinese offers some interesting conflicts between the two. Our experiments investigate how these conflicts are resolved by the parser. We find that the pressure to assign a referent to an EC can reverse familiar parsing preferences based on structural economy. A complement clause analysis may be preferred over a main clause analysis, or a relative clause analysis over a complement clause analysis, if they offer a better interpretation of an empty subject.