c. adverbial in subordinate clause; dative NP in relative clause
After NP-NOM [Adv] NP-ACC verb, NP-NOM [who [NP-DAT] NP-ACC
verb],...
d.adverbial and dative NP in relative clause
After NP-NOM NP-ACC verb, NP-NOM [who [Adv] [NP-DAT] NP-ACC
verb],...
(6) A target sentence used in the condition (a)
Nachdem der Lehrer [zur zusätzlichen Ahndung des mehrfachen
After the teacher as additional payback for multiple
Fehlverhaltens] [dem ungezogenen Sohn des fl eißigen
wrongdoings the.DAT naughty son the.GEN industrious
Hausmeisters] den Strafunterricht verhängte hat, der
janitor the.ACC detention.classes imposed has the.NOM
Mitshchüler, [der den fußball verstecht hat],
classmate who.NOM the.ACC football hidden has
die Sache bereinigt.
the affair corrected
“After the teacher imposed detention classes on the naughty son of the
industrious janitor as additional payback for the multiple wrongdoings, the
classmate who hid the football corrected the affair.”The critical region is the verb in the relative clause verstecht ‘hidden’, and
Levy and Keller (201 3) observed a statistically reliable interaction between the
positioning of the adverbial and the dative NP. More specifi cally, there was a
reading-time slowdown in (5a) compared with (5c), and also a slowdown in
(5d) compared with (5c) in the second-pass time measure^2. A similar pattern
was also observed in the spillover region. They argued that the patterns of
reading-time slowdowns they observed contain both expectation and locality
effects. For example, the difference between (5a) and (5c) shows that the added
constituent before the verb in (5c) facilitated the processing of the verb. In
(5c), the critical verb was preceded by a dative NP, and the verb in (5c) was
read faster than the verb in (5a) in which there was no dative NP before the
verb, which is similar to the fi nding in Konieczny and Döring (2003). Note
also that adding an adverb in the relative clause did not facilitate the processing
of the verb in (5b). Although the reading time of the verb in (5b) was numeri-
cally shorter than that in (5a), the difference was not statistically signifi cant.
The lack of clear facilitation with an adverbial further suggests that the expecta-
tions are primarily driven by information about argument structure of the
predicate that was made clear from the set of preverbal NPs in the structure.
Even though it seems intuitive to witness that the combined semantic informa-
tion of an adverbial and an accusative NP helps the reader predict the lexical
content of the upcoming predicate, the results in Levy and Keller (201 3) suggest
88 Hajime Ono et al.