Processing of Centre-embedded and Right-branching Relative Clauses in Slovenian

Abstract

The current consensus in the literature of processing of relative clauses states that centre-embedded relative clauses introduce a heavy computational load. While this is well-established, most evidence for it comes from English, while the empirical evidence from many other languages is still lacking. Here, we try to fill this gap by researching the differences in the processing times of centre-embedded and right-branching relative clauses in Slovenian. We report results from a sentence-picture matching task, in which we observe longer reaction times and lower accuracy when the participants are dealing with centre-embedded relative clauses, compared to right-branching ones. This result provides important evidence in a so far largely under-investigated language, contributing to the theoretical claim that the difficulties observed in the processing of centre-embedded relative clauses are language-independent.