Acceso usuarios
;
Donati, Caterina
[2]
;
Francesca Foppolo
[1]
Milán, Italia
París, Francia
This paper investigates how sentence processing resolves temporary structural ambiguities when competing biases conflict: a preference for structurally simpler representations (Avoid nodes) and a dispreference for filler–gap dependencies (Avoid gaps). Across four experiments in French and Italian, we examine verbs like ‘convince’, which allow either a transitive structure with a relative clause (RC) or a ditransitive structure with a complement clause (CC). Two Maze tasks and two forced-choice tasks were used to assess parsing preferences. In French, no clear preference emerged between RC and CC continuations. However, reaction times consistently revealed a processing cost for RCs, even in unambiguous contexts, suggesting that this cost reflects the intrinsic burden of filler–gap dependencies rather than disambiguation. In Italian, participants showed a clear preference for CC structures, with increased processing costs for RCs only in ambiguous conditions. This indicates that, when in conflict, the Avoid gaps bias prevails over Avoid nodes. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference follows from the locality of filler–gap dependencies: in French, gaps are resolved immediately, whereas in Italian they are not. These findings refine the Minimal Chain Principle, suggesting that processing difficulty arises from maintaining unresolved dependencies rather than from gap formation itself.
