Priming effects from gaps to antecedents

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Abstract
Recent research has suggested that null anaphors or gaps can prime their antecedents analogous to facilitation from pronouns. These results are open to alternative interpretations and may reflect other factors such as processing load rather than actual priming effects from gaps. An experiment designed to eliminate alternative interpretations was conducted using passive sentences, where gap and no-gap conditions differed by only one word. In a probe recognition task, subjects responded faster to a probe word when that word corresponded to the antecedent of a gap than when it did not. Responses in three control measures indicated that facilitation effects were due to the gap and not to extraneous factors. The stimuli were evaluated in Experiment 2. Ratings on measures critical for the presence of a gap correctly predicted Experiment 1 response times to the gap's antecedent; additional ratings indicated that the priming effect could not be attributed to discourse focus shifts. The results reveal that syntactic differences in three superficially similar grammatical constructions affect the processing of these constructions, and they reaffirm that gaps do prime their antecedents during on-line language processing.