Working memory, animacy, and verb class in the processing of relative clauses

In three eye-movement monitoring experiments, participants' working memory capacity was assessed and they read sentences containing subject-extracted and object-extracted relative clauses, In Experiment 1, sentences lacked helpful semantic cues, object-relatives were harder to process than subject relatives, and working memory capacity did not moderate syntactic complexity effects. In Experiments 2 and 3, categorical distinctions between critical nouns provided helpful semantic cues to syntactic structure and interpretation. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that helpful semantic cues reduced or eliminated syntactic complexity effects, and that this reduction was not produced by lexical properties of specific verbs. Further, in Experiment 2 working memory capacity moderated the interaction of syntactic complexity and semantic cues. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.