In previous research it has been shown that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Several theories have been proposed that explain the difference on the basis of different theoretical perspectives. However, previous research tested relative clauses only with animate protagonists. In a corpus study of Dutch and German newspaper texts, we show that animacy is an important determinant of the distribution of subject and object relative clauses. In two experiments in Dutch, in which the animacy of the object of the relative clause is varied, no difference in reading time is obtained between subject and object relative clauses when the object is inanimate. The experiments show that animacy influences the processing difficulty of relative clauses. These results can only be accounted for by current major theories of relative clause processing when additional assumptions are introduced, and at the same time show that the possibility of semantically driven analysis can be considered as a serious alternative. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)

For several languages, a preference for subject relative clauses over object relative clauses has been reported. However, Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2002) showed that there is no such preference for relative clauses with an animate subject and an inanimate object. A Dutch object relative clause as . . .de rots, die de wandelaars beklommen hebben. . . ('the rock, that the hikers climbed') did not show longer reading times than its subject relative clause counterpart . . .de wandelaars, die de rots beklommen hebben. . . ('the hikers, who climbed the rock'). In the present paper, we explore the factors that might contribute to this modulation of the usual preference for subject relative clauses. Experiment 1 shows that the animacy of the antecedent per se is not the decisive factor. On the contrary, in relative clauses with an inanimate antecedent and an inanimate relative-clause-internal noun phrase, the usual preference for subject relative clauses is found. In Experiments 2 and 3, subject and object relative clauses were contrasted in which either the subject or the object was inanimate. The results are interpreted in a framework in which the choice for an analysis of the relative clause is based on the interplay of animacy with topichood and verb semantics. This framework accounts for the commonly reported preference for subject relative clauses over object relative clauses as well as for the pattern of data found in the present experiments. Ó 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Keywords: Parsing; Topichood; Animacy; Relative clauses Processing relative clauses in Dutch: When rocks crush hikersWhen readers process a sentence, there are different types of information available to arrive at the correct interpretation of the sentence. These types of information include the syntactic structure of the sentence, the semantic content of the words in the sentence, and pragmatic influences from the discourse in which the sentence is embedded. At any point in the sentence, the different sources of information may either work together to guide the reader towards the correct interpretation of the sentence or provide contradictory cues about the interpretation of the sentence.This paper investigates how some of these sources of information interact in the processing of Dutch subject and object relative clauses. Examples of a subject

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We present a computational model that provides a unified account of inference, coherence, and disambiguation. It simulates how the build-up of coherence in text leads to the knowledge-based resolution of referential ambiguity. Possible interpretations of an ambiguity are represented by centers of gravity in a high-dimensional space. The unresolved ambiguity forms a vector in the same space. This vector is attracted by the centers of gravity, while also being affected by context information and world knowledge. When the vector reaches one of the centers of gravity, the ambiguity is resolved to the corresponding interpretation. The model accounts for reading time and error rate data from experiments on ambiguous pronoun resolution and explains the effects of context informativeness, anaphor type, and processing depth. It shows how implicit causality can have an early effect during reading. A novel prediction is that ambiguities can remain unresolved if there is insufficient disambiguating information

Advanced learners' comprehension of discourse connectives: the role of L1 transfer across on-line and off-line tasks. AbstractDiscourse connectives are important indicators of textual coherence, and mastering them is an essential part of acquiring a language. In this paper, we compare advanced learners' sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by connectives in an off-line grammaticality judgment task and an online reading experiment using eye-tracking. We also assess the influence of L1 transfer by comparing learners' comprehension of two non native-like semantic uses of connectives in English, often produced by learners due to transfer from French and Dutch. Our results indicate that in an off-line task, transfer is an important factor accounting for French-and Dutchspeaking learners' non native-like comprehension of connectives. During on-line processing however, learners are as sensitive as native speakers to the meaning conveyed by connectives.These results raise intriguing questions regarding explicit vs. implicit knowledge in language learners.

When students read their school text, they may make a coherent mental representation of it that contains coherence relations between the text segments. The construction of such a representation is a prerequisite for learning from texts. This article focuses on the influence of connectives (therefore, furthermore) and layout (continuous placement of sentences vs. each sentence beginning a new line) on the dynamics of the reading process as well as the quality of students' mental representation. The results shed light on the cognitive reading processes of students in secondary education, which allows us to explain effects of text features on off-line comprehension measures. Our eye-tracking data emphasize the importance of connectives: Connectives speed up students' processing, especially when texts have a continuous layout. In contrast, students' processing slows when they read texts with a discontinuous layout. Our data also show a correlation between reading times and scores on bridging inference tasks: Students who read faster have higher comprehension scores. These findings indicate that explicit texts with a continuous layout place fewer processing demands on students' working memory.

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