How long can you hold the wh-filler?

Kim, N., Brehm, L., Sturt, P., & Yoshida, M. (2018). How long can you hold the wh-filler?. Poster presented at the 31st Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (CUNY 2018), Davis, CA, USA.
We investigate how wh-fillers are maintained in memory in two wh-filler-gap dependency (WhFGD) formations: "reactivated" WhFGD formation (the filler is linked to the verb once and the wh-filler is reactivated later) and "active" WhFGD formation. We ask whether Wh-fillers are maintained in a distinguished memory state until the dependency is resolved. No agreement attraction is observed for the coordination sentences, suggesting that only partial information (e.g., the head or the syntactic category of the NP) is retrieved. The active-filler showed agreement attraction, where the wh-dependency is kept until the licensor appears, suggesting fine-grained information is maintained for the active filler.
Publication type
Poster
Publication date
2018

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