In wh-in-situ languages like Mandarin Chinese, in which the wh-phrase remains in a canonical argument position in wh-questions, syntactic theories generally posit that a covert dependency between the in-situ position and a clause-initial syntactic operator must nonetheless hold at logical form. Wh-in-situ languages and wh-fronted languages are in this way abstractly similar. This paper investigates whether the processing of Mandarin wh-in-situ questions indeed involves constructing a long-distance dependency. Using the multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) paradigm, we show that Chinese wh-in-situ questions incur more processing costs than their non-wh counterparts. Furthermore, the length of the covert dependency affects only processing accuracy, but not processing speed. This pattern suggests a content-addressable memory process underlying the construction of wh-in-situ dependencies, similar to overt long distance dependencies in English. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

The present study examined the processing of the Mandarin Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji to evaluate the role that syntactic structure plays in the memory retrieval operations that support sentence comprehension. Using the multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (MR-SAT) paradigm, we measured the speed with which comprehenders retrieve an antecedent for ziji. Our experimental materials contrasted sentences where ziji's antecedent was in the local clause with sentences where ziji's antecedent was in a distant clause. Time course results from MR-SAT suggest that ziji dependencies with syntactically distant antecedents are slower to process than syntactically local dependencies. To aid in interpreting the SAT data, we present a formal model of the antecedent retrieval process, and derive quantitative predictions about the time course of antecedent retrieval. The modeling results support the Local Search hypothesis: during syntactic retrieval, comprehenders initially limit memory search to the local syntactic domain. We argue that Local Search hypothesis has important implications for theories of locality effects in sentence comprehension. In particular, our results suggest that not all locality effects may be reduced to the effects of temporal decay and retrieval interference.