DOI

10.1080/23273798.2026.2649499

Abstract

Although object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are more difficult to process than subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is still substantial disagreement regarding the cognitive mechanisms underlying these effects. The current visual-world eyetracking experiment took a novel approach to this problem by examining whether ORC-SRC differences would emerge at the matrix verb during the processing of spoken sentences containing these structures. Fixation patterns at the onset of the matrix verb revealed a tendency for participants to fixate the picture representing the subject of the sentence in both ORCs and SRCs. Crucially, participants considered the picture corresponding to a competing noun more while processing ORCs versus SRCs. The results are most readily explained under a memory-retrieval account of relative-clause processing, according to which language comprehenders experience less retrieval interference while processing SRCs than ORCs. The findings also highlight the visual-world paradigm as a fruitful approach for studying the processing of complex syntactic structures.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-26-2026

Publisher Statement

© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group   This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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