Rebels without a clause: Processing reflexives in fronted wh-predicates

Second chances in antecedent retrieval: The processing of reflexives in two types of reconstruction environments

“…In a self-paced reading experiment, Omaki (2010) found that at least initially the processor considers the matrix subject to be a potential antecedent for the reflexive in both wh-predicates and wh-arguments, although the effect persisted longer for arguments. Omaki et al (2019) replicated the findings of Omaki (2010) and revealed a further important property: the backward search that the reflexives in wh-predicates engage in is not structurally guided but rather determined by recency. They presented stimuli like those in (7), where a mismatched antecedent was either a c-commanding matrix subject or a non-c-commanding subject within a relative clause that is linearly more recent than the matrix subject.…”

“…In fact, there is suggestive evidence in Omaki (2010)'s reading time studies that the mismatch effect is more short-lived with reflexives in predicates than arguments. Similarly, Omaki et al (2019)'s Experiment 2 found attenuated mismatch effects in eye-tracking measures for reflexives in fronted wh-predicates compared to nonfronted wh-predicates. They offer a speculationalbeit emphasizing its post hoc naturethat the readers may have quickly realized that the retrieved antecedent would not be grammatically licensed and therefore moved on to a forward search, thus minimizing the gender mismatch effect.…”

“…If the non-structurally guided 5 A reviewer questions whether the sentence completion results rule out the pronoun expectancy explanation. We acknowledge that there remain open questions for Omaki et al (2019), but we would like to point out the following. In the completion study, Omaki et al found a roughly 40% chance of continuations with a pronoun calling back to the earlier noun phrase, and an almost equal chance of callback to the more recent noun phrase, and no significant preference on the lenient coding.…”

Number attraction in verb and anaphor production

“…Retrieval accounts can explain this contrast by suggesting that verbs and reflexives prioritize different cues during feature-checking (e.g. reflexives prioritize structural cues; Cunnings & Sturt, 2014;Dillon et al, 2013;Omaki et al, 2019;inter alia). Representational accounts can explain the contrast by asserting that reflexive agreement processing does not rely on the same incorrect or ambiguous number representation as verb agreement (reliance on the same representation should lead to the same attraction profile under a representational account).…”

“…This account relies on the same basic principle used by retrieval models of attraction to explain the contrast between verbs and reflexives in comprehension (e.g. Cunnings & Sturt, 2014;Dillon et al, 2013;Omaki et al, 2019) -that is, reflexive dependency resolution prioritizes structural information, whereas verb dependencies do not. Within a retrieval model of attraction, this syntactic prioritization could manifest in different cue prioritization for reflexive pronouns compared to verbs, with reflexives prioritizing syntactic cues and verbs prioritizing morphological cues (e.g.…”