Vol. 9 (2023)
Articles

The Unexpected Lightness of the Main Verb: An Eye-Tracking Study on Relative Clauses and Trace Reactivation

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  • Leonardo Concetti,
  • Vincenzo Moscati
Leonardo Concetti
Università degli Studi di Siena
Vincenzo Moscati
Università degli Studi di Siena
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-15148

Published 2023-09-30

Keywords

  • Eye-tracking,
  • Intervention effects,
  • Relative clauses,
  • Trace reactivation,
  • Working memory

How to Cite

Concetti, L., & Moscati, V. (2023). The Unexpected Lightness of the Main Verb: An Eye-Tracking Study on Relative Clauses and Trace Reactivation. Quaderni Di Linguistica E Studi Orientali, 9, 45–58. https://doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-15148

Copyright (c) 2023 Leonardo Concetti, Vincenzo Moscati

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

A few studies on relative-clause processing report an unexpected facilitatory effect on the matrix verb that follows an  Object Relative (ORC) clause (e.g. Staub, Dillon and Clifton jr. 2017). In this study we present the results of a novel eye-tracking experiment that replicated this effect on Italian. The advantage of ORCs is discussed under the hypothesis that subject-verb agreement in the matrix benefits from a general trace-reactivation mechanisms, subsumed from activation-based retrieval models (Lewis and Vasishth 2005).

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