In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory – Featural Relativized Minimality – has argued that the wh-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two wh-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of wh-phrases should also contribute to wh-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in wh-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of wh-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the wh-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in wh-dependencies.

Much work has demonstrated that children are able to use bottom-up linguistic cues to incrementally interpret sentences, but there is little understanding of the extent to which children's comprehension mechanisms are guided by top-down linguistic information that can be learned from distributional regularities in the input. Using a visual world eye tracking experiment and a corpus analysis, the current study investigates whether 5-and 6-year-old children incrementally assign interpretations to temporarily ambiguous wh-questions like What was Emily eating the cake with __? In the visual world eye-tracking experiment, adults demonstrated evidence for active dependency formation at the earliest region (i.e., the verb region), while 6-year-old children demonstrated a spill-over effect of this bias in the subsequent NP region. No evidence for this bias was found in 5-year-olds, although the speed of arrival at the ultimately correct instrument interpretation appears to be modulated by the vocabulary size. These results suggest that adult-like active formation of filler-gap dependencies begins to emerge around age 6. The corpus analysis of filler-gap dependency structures in adult corpora and child corpora demonstrate that the distributional regularities in either corpora are equally in favor of early, incremental completion of filler-gap dependencies, suggesting that the distributional information in the input is either not relevant to this incremental bias, or that 5-year-old children are somehow unable to recruit this information in real-time comprehension. Taken together, these findings shed light on the origin of incremental processing bias in filler-gap dependency processing, as well as on the role of language experience and cognitive constraints in the development of incremental sentence processing mechanisms.

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We present four experiments investigating adaptation to a regional grammatical structure through reading exposure, using both the needs + past participle construction (e.g., The car needs washed) and the double modal construction (e.g. You might could go there). In each experiment, participants read two stories containing informal dialogue. Half of the participants were exposed to one of the regional constructions and half were not. Those readers exposed to the regional constructions adapted, gradually reading the novel constructions faster over 9 to 15 exemplars. The degree to which the exposed group learned the construction was tested in two ways. In the first two experiments, learning was measured by comparing reading times to acceptable and unacceptable variants of the novel constructions. Readers did not learn either the verb tense rule for the needs construction (Experiment 1) or a simple ordering rule for double modal constructions (Experiment 2). Similarly, in Experiments 3 and 4, metalinguistic judgments used to test learning revealed that participants had failed to acquire the regional grammar of either novel construction. These experiments suggest that the adaptation effects reflect learning some general properties of the experimental stimuli, not learning the syntactic constructions themselves.

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