UC Santa Cruz

The main question proposed in this study concentrates on the issue of whether implicit agents trigger retrieval interference in sentence comprehension and whether this depends on their syntactic representation. In order to address this question, we examined two impersonal passive constructions in the Ukrainian language, which differ with regard to the presence of implicit causative agent. This study presents an online forced-choice acceptability and self-paced reading experiments comparing the processing of the passive constructions with syntactically represented implicit agents and passive constructions without such implicit agents. In addition, the online self-paced reading experiment compares the processing of subject extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object extracted relative clauses (ORCs) to reveal whether parsing relative clause effects retrieval interference and test whether a widely known ORC/SRC asymmetry shown in many languages including Russian (Levy, 2013) holds for Ukrainian as well. The results of the self-paced reading experiment support a retrieval-based account of interference effects in sentence processing and the idea that sentence processing is constrained by working memory limitations. Conducting this study contributes to the existing psycholinguistic literature on retrieval interference and processing of implicit agents, and helps us gain a better understanding of the nature of the parsing mechanisms that support human language processing.