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The real-time comprehension of WH-dependencies in a WH-agreement language
- Language
- Linguistic Society of America
- Volume 91, Number 1, March 2015
- pp. 109-144
- 10.1353/lan.2015.0001
- Article
- Additional Information
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In the verb-initial language Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands, wh -dependencies exhibit a special verbal inflection known as wh-agreement : verbs along the path of the wh -dependency are inflected for the grammatical relation of the gap and the intermediate landing sites of the filler. Two on-line comprehension experiments conducted in the Northern Mariana Islands reveal that the morphological paradigm of wh -agreement affects the timing of dependency formation and interpretation in this language. Overt wh -agreement facilitates the formation of a wh -dependency. When overt wh -agreement could occur but does not, however, its absence delays and attenuates wh -dependency formation. In short, morphological information exerts a powerful influence on the unfolding parse, one that has temporal priority over syntactic information, such as word order, and semantic information, such as argument structure.