Clause avoidance: evidence for a structural parsing principle

The Minimal Chain Principle (MCP; De Vincenzi, 1991) proposes

that the parser avoids postulating unnecessary filler-gap dependencies,

but does not delay postulating required dependency members. A large body

of research has confirmed the second of these principles, under the

heading of 'active gap filling,' but there have been few tests of the

first principle. The present study investigated the processing of strings

such as The information that the health department provided, where the

that-clause can be analyzed either as a relative clause (RC; The

information that the health department provided reassured the tour

operators), which involves a filler-gap dependency, or as a nominal

complement clause (CC; The information that the health department

provided a cure reassured the tour operators), which does not. In three

eye movement experiments, readers showed difficulty upon disambiguation

toward the RC analysis, indicating that they initially adopted the CC

analysis. Readers also showed facilitated processing of the ambiguous

material itself when the CC analysis was available, again indicating that

they adopted this analysis in preference to the difficulty-inducing RC

analysis. Notably, the bias of a specific head noun (e.g., information)

to appear with a CC did not modulate these effects. These results support

the MCP's first principle, and confirm that processing of filler-gap

dependencies is guided by structural principles rather than lexicallyspecific

argument structure biases.