THE PROCESSING OF LOCALLY AMBIGUOUS RELATIVE CLAUSES IN GERMAN

The processing of locally ambiguous German relative clauses was studied with a self-paced reading task. In three experiments, subjects read sentences which contained either a subject relative clause or an object relative clause. The part of the sentence preceding the lexical item disambiguating between subject and object relative clause had a semantic bias either toward a subject relative clause reading or toward an object relative clause reading, or was neutral with respect to the two readings. The results showed a preference for the subject relative clause reading in the neutral condition. This result is in line with the Active Filler Strategy, a parsing principle which has been proposed for the processing of filler-gap constructions (e.g., Frazier and Flores d'Arcais, 1989). Furthermore, semantic plausibility information preceding the disambiguating item did not immediately influence the filler-gap assignment in the present study. The latter result is discussed in relation to studies on the processing of filler-gap constructions in English which do show an immediate influence of semantic plausibility on filler-gap assignment. (C) 1995 Academic Press. Inc.