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Processing long-distance dependencies: an experimental investigation of grammatical illusions in English and Spanish
A central concern in the study of sentence comprehension has to do with defining the role that
grammatical information plays during the incremental interpretation of language. In order to
successfully achieve the complex task of understanding a linguistic message, the language
comprehension system (the parser) must – among other things – be able to resolve the wide
variety of relations that are established between the different parts of a sentence. These relations
are known as linguistic dependencies. Linguistic dependencies are subject to a diverse range of
grammatical constraints (e.g. syntactic, morphological, lexical, etc.), and how these constraints
are implemented in real-time comprehension is one of the fundamental questions in
psycholinguistic research. In this quest, the focus has been often placed on studying the
sensitivity that language users exhibit to grammatical contrasts during sentence processing. The
grammatical richness with which the parser seems to operate makes it even more interesting
when the results of sentence processing do not converge with the constraints of the grammar.
Misalignments between grammar and parsing provide a unique window into the principles that
guide language comprehension, and their study has generated a fruitful research program
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