ABSTRACT
There is much evidence supporting Discourse Locality Theory (Gibson, 2000) and Early Immediate Constituents (Hawkins, 2001), both of which suggest that in human sentence parsing, increasing argument-head distance causes increased processing difficulty. We present new data from two self-paced reading studies which show that increasing argument-head distance can facilitate processing, and that this facilitation is due to increased activation levels – and, consequently, faster retrieval – of items in memory. A third self-paced reading study shows that (a) similarity-based interference (SBI) (Lewis & Nakayama, 2001) can increase retrieval difficulty and (b) this increased difficulty cancels out the facilitation due to increased activation observed in the second experiment. In sum, we argue that distance per se cannot be the determiner of processing difficulty, and that a combination of decay, activation, and SBI provide better cross-linguistic coverage.
