Electrifying Adjunct Islands

Abstract

Filler-gap dependencies are processed actively, and active dependency formation is grammatically constrained. Of specific interest in this talk are adjunct islands, which according to Truswell (2007) are of variable island status in accordance with the relation between the main clause and adjunct clause event structure. Previous work included a judgment study and a self-paced reading study, which upon post hoc analysis seemed to suggest that comprehension of dependencies in adjunct islands involves both revision and surprisal. Because of EEG’s aptitude in measuring syntactic reanalysis and surprisal, we look to our most recent study of EEG data to confirm or deny our previous analysis.