Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In many languages it has been found that object relative clauses such as: "The student that the teacher met", are more difficult than the corresponding subject relative clauses, such as "The teacher that met the students". It has also been shown that this preference disappears when the object of the relative clause is inanimate, as in the "The books that the teacher read", and even reverses when the subject of the relative clause is a pronoun, as in the Dutch sentence "De student, die jullie ontmoetten" (the student that you met; Mak, Vonk, & Schriefers, 2008).

Corpus studies have shown that the difficulty of the different types of relative clauses correlate with the frequency with which they occur. This has led several researchers to propose that frequency determines processing difficulty. However, on the basis of this correlation, it cannot be decided whether it is frequency that makes the sentences sound "good", or whether their "goodness" determines their frequency of occurrence. I will present the results of a series of eye tracking experiments, in which I tried to disentangle these two possibilities. I will argue that it is not the frequency of occurrence that determines the processing ease. Instead, I will argue that processing ease is determined by the role that the entities in the relative clause play in the discourse.