ABSTRACT
Discourse context has been argued to be the factor responsible for increased processing difficulty in non-canonical order sentences: if appropriate discourse context is provided, (the argument goes) canonical and non-canonical order sentences are equally easy to process. This research shows that discourse context is not the only factor affecting processing difficulty in non-canonical order sentences: the distance between arguments and verbs affects the ease with which the former can be integrated with the latter, and sufficiently increasing this distance makes processing difficult, regardless of discourse context. This result is interesting because it contradicts the widespread view that discourse information determines processing ease in non-canonical order sentences. The results presented here demonstrate that information structure has a facilitating effect on processing just in case other, equally important factors do not dominate.
