Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates sentence processing in Standard Arabic (SA) by examining subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (SRCs and ORCs) through eye tracking. We test memory- and expectation-based theories of processing difficulty, and whether good-enough or noisy-channel processing leads to misinterpretations in ORCs. Our results find increased processing difficulty in ORCs, supporting expectation-based theories; however, this processing difficulty is not localized to the disambiguating region (relative clause verb) as predicted, but rather at the integration of the second noun phrase (relative clause NP). The findings support good-enough/noisy-channel processing theories, suggesting that readers may accept a noisy SRC interpretation of an ORC, and thus bypass integration costs at the RC NP.