The use of “that” in the Production and Comprehension of Object Relative Clauses

We explore the interplay between production and comprehension by investigating why producers insert or omit the function word “that” in Object Relative Clauses, and how this choice affects comprehension. We present data from three experiments which suggests that producers insert “that” to alleviate production difficulty and in doing so create a distributional pattern of “that” use. Comprehenders are shown to be sensitive to these patterns. Implications for the interaction of comprehension and production processes are discussed.