What makes object relative clauses hard to process? Psycholinguistic evidence from Italian

What is it about?

This study explores how people process sentences in real time, focusing on relative clauses in Italian. In particular, it compares subject relatives (e.g. “the boy who chased the dog”) with object relatives (e.g. “the boy who the dog chased”). Previous research has consistently shown that object relatives are harder to understand, but it is still unclear exactly when and why this difficulty arises. To address this, we carried out two experiments using the same sentences but different methods. In the first experiment, we used a modified maze task, in which participants chose the next correct word in the critical region, combined with a self-paced reading task. In the second experiment, participants completed a standard self-paced reading task. The results confirmed that object relatives are more difficult to process than subject relatives. Crucially, the maze task showed that this difficulty emerges very early (that is, right after the word introducing the relative clause) and continues throughout the sentence. This early effect was not clearly visible in the standard self-paced reading task, suggesting that the maze method provides a more precise way of identifying when processing difficulties arise. Finally, we considered structural, memory-based, and expectation-based approaches proposed in the literature to explain this pattern. We argue that our findings can be brought together under a more unified explanation, building on the idea of featural Relativised Minimality, which may account for both early and later processing difficulties.

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Photo by Daniel Adesina on Unsplash

Photo by Daniel Adesina on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study highlights at least two important points for research on language processing. First, it shows that different experimental methods can lead to different conclusions, even when using the same linguistic material. In our case, the maze task revealed early processing difficulties that were not clearly visible in the self-paced reading task. This underlines how crucial methodological choices are in psycholinguistics, as they directly shape how we interpret the timing and nature of sentence processing. Second, the study emphasises the need for theoretically grounded explanations. In particular, we argue that general cognitive factors, such as memory or expectations, are not sufficient to explain the results on their own. It is also necessary to consider the structural properties of language, which play a central role in shaping processing difficulty. This suggests that linguistic theory is essential for understanding how sentences are processed in real time.