When a missing verb makes a French sentence more acceptable

Abstract

Using an off-line complexity judgement task, Gibson and Thomas (1999) demonstrated that people found sentences with double centre-embedded relative clauses as easy to understand when the second verb phrase (VP) was omitted as when there were the three required verb phrases. This paper reports a self-paced reading experiment testing this syntactic illusion in French language. The results showed that readers rated the sentences where the second VP was omitted as easier to understand than the grammatical versions, even though the reading time of the last VP was longer for the ungrammatical version. The overall results support theories predicting that the sentence acceptability rating can be enhanced when a syntactically required word with an excessive integration cost is removed. The results are consistent with resource-based theories of sentence processing.

Keywords:

• Comprehension
• Syntax
• Verb

Acknowledgements

We thank Professor David Caplan for helpful comments. Francois Rigalleau was supported by a grant ACI ‘Psycholinguistic processes and meaning construction’ given by the University of Poitiers.