Recent investigations of filler-gap dependencies in sentence processing have assumed that the parser must compute an antecedent-trace relationship in which the trace site is identical to the canonical position of the moved phrase. Pickering and Barry's challenge to this view is refuted and a "direct association hypothesis" is suggested.…

Issues in syntactic processing, that aspect of the human sentence comprehension mechanism that recovers a syntactic structure for a given word string, are discussed. In particular, two structural ambiguities in Mandarin Chinese are examined and their successful parsing within the framework of minimal parsing models is discussed. Recent work…