Your browser does not support the PubReader view.
Go to this page to see a list of supporting browsers.
The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.564-579
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Apr 2026
Received 30 Dec 2025 Revised 11 Feb 2026 Accepted 05 Mar 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202604.564

Retrieving Antecedents in Noun Phrase Ellipsis and Reflexive Dependencies: New Evidence from a Maze Task Experiment

Nayoun Kim
Associate Professor Sungkyunkwan University 25-2 Seonggyungwan-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul 03063, Republic of Korea, Tel: +82-2-760-0270 nayoun@skku.edu


© 2026 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the processing of Noun Phrase Ellipsis (NPE) involves the reactivation of structural, semantic, and morphological information associated with the antecedent (Kim et al. 2019), and that reflexive processing adheres to Binding Principle A, requiring a structurally and semantically constrained antecedent (Chomsky 1981, Dillon et al. 2013, Sturt 2003). However, no prior work has examined antecedent retrieval in sentences that contain both ellipsis and reflexive dependencies. The present study tested a strong structural-recovery account, which predicts that sufficiently detailed structural, category-level, and morphological information from the NPE antecedent should guide subsequent reflexive resolution. Using the G-Maze paradigm (Boyce et al. 2020, Forster et al. 2009, Witzel and Forster 2014) and illusions of grammaticality (Wagers et al. 2009) as a diagnostic, we found, contrary to our predictions, that illusions emerged in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. This pattern is inconsistent with the predictions of the strong structural-recovery account and suggests that any reactivated structural information does not reliably constrain reflexive resolution in the predicted manner. At the same time, the findings do not isolate a single alternative mechanism and are compatible with multiple explanations, including reliance on linearly local cues, memory-based limitations, or task-related properties of the Maze paradigm. We therefore interpret these results as placing meaningful constraints on strong structural-recovery accounts and as motivating further research to adjudicate among competing explanations.

Keywords:

syntactic processing, ellipsis, a maze-task experiment, reflexive, the processing of dependencies, illusion of grammaticality, memory

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2025S1A5A8008853).

References

  • Baayen, R. H., D. J. Davidson and D. M. Bates. 2008. Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 390-412. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005]
  • Bates, D., M. Mächler, B. Bolker and S. Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1), 1-48. [https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01]
  • Boyce, V., R. Futrell and R. P. Levy. 2020. Maze made easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty. Journal of Memory and Language 111, 104082. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104082]
  • Büring, D. 2005. Binding Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris Publications.
  • Cunnings, I. and P. Sturt. 2014. Coargumenthood and the processing of reflexives. Journal of Memory and Language 75, 117-139. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.05.006]
  • Cunnings, I. and P. Sturt. 2018. Retrieval interference and semantic interpretation. Journal of Memory and Language 102, 16-27. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.05.001]
  • Dillon, B., A. Mishler, S. Sloggett and C. Phillips. 2013. Contrasting intrusion profiles for agreement and anaphora: Experimental and modeling evidence. Journal of Memory and Language 69(2), 85-103. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.04.003]
  • Ferreira, F. and N. D. Patson. 2007. The ‘good enough’ approach to language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(1-2), 71-83. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00007.x]
  • Forster, K., C. Guerrera and L. Elliot. 2009. The maze task: Measuring forced incremental sentence processing time. Behavior Research Methods 41(1), 163-171. [https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.41.1.163]
  • Frazier, L. and C. Clifton, Jr. 2001. Parsing coordinates and ellipsis: Copy α. Syntax 4(1), 1-22. [https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9612.00034]
  • Gibson, E. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68, 1-76. [https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00034-1]
  • Gibson, E. 2000. The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita and W. O’Neil, eds., Image, Language, Brain, 95-126. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3654.003.0008]
  • Gibson, E., N. Pearlmutter, E. Canseco-Gonzalez and G. Hickok. 1996. Recency preference in the human sentence processing mechanism. Cognition 59(1), 23-59. [https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(95)00687-7]
  • Ha, Y., M. Frazier and N. Kim. 2025. Grammaticality illusions in the real-time processing of backward noun phrase ellipsis. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 25, 277-288. [https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202502.277]
  • Jäger, L. A., F. Engelmann and S. Vasishth. 2017. Similarity-based interference in sentence comprehension: Literature review and Bayesian meta-analysis. Journal of Memory and Language 94, 316-339. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2017.01.004]
  • Keshev, M. and A. Meltzer-Asscher. 2024. The representation of agreement features in memory is updated during sentence processing: Evidence from verb-reflexive interactions. Journal of Memory and Language 135, 104495. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2023.104495]
  • Kim, N., L. Brehm and M. Yoshida. 2019. The online processing of noun phrase ellipsis and mechanisms of antecedent retrieval. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 34(2), 190-213. [https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1513542]
  • Kim, N., L. Brehm, P. Sturt and M. Yoshida. 2020. How long can you hold the filler: Maintenance and retrieval. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 35(1), 17-42. [https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1626456]
  • Konieczny, L., H. Weldle, S. Wolfer, D. Müller and P. Baumann. 2010. Anaphora and local coherences. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1204-1209.
  • Kush, D. W. 2013. Respecting Relations: Memory Access and Antecedent Retrieval in Incremental Sentence Processing. Doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.
  • Lago, S., D. E. Shalom, M. Sigman, E. F. Lau and C. Phillips. 2015. Agreement attraction in Spanish comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 82, 133-149. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.02.002]
  • Lewis, R. L. and S. Vasishth. 2005. An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science 29(3), 375-419. [https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0000_25]
  • Logačev, P. and S. Vasishth. 2016. A multiple-channel model of task-dependent ambiguity resolution in sentence comprehension. Cognitive Science 40(2), 266-298. [https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12228]
  • Martin, A. E. and B. McElree. 2008. A content-addressable pointer mechanism underlies comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis. Journal of Memory and Language 58(3), 879-906. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.06.010]
  • Martin, A. E. and B. McElree. 2009. Memory operations that support language comprehension: Evidence from verb-phrase ellipsis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 35(5), 1231-1239. [https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016271]
  • Martin, A. E. and B. McElree. 2011. Direct-access retrieval during sentence comprehension: Evidence from Sluicing. Journal of Memory and Language 64(4), 327-343. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2010.12.006]
  • McElree, B. 2000. Sentence comprehension is mediated by content-addressable memory structures. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 29, 111-123. [https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005184709695]
  • Merchant, J. 2001. The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipsis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. [https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199243730.001.0001]
  • Merchant, J. 2013. Diagnosing ellipsis. Diagnosing Syntax 1, 537-542. [https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199602490.003.0026]
  • Orth, W., D. M. Nemeskey and E. Ronai. (2025). Extending the maze task to Hungarian: New insights in relative clause processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Advance online publication. [https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001515]
  • Parker, D. and A. An. 2018. Not all phrases are equally attractive: Experimental evidence for selective agreement attraction effects. Frontiers in Psychology 9, 1566. [https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01566]
  • Reinhart, T. M. 1976. The Syntactic Domain of Anaphora. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
  • Reinhart, T. and E. Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24(4), 657-720.
  • Sturt, P. 2003. The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 48(3), 542-562. [https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00536-3]
  • Swets, B., T. Desmet, C. Clifton and F. Ferreira. 2008. Underspecification of syntactic ambiguities: Evidence from self-paced reading. Memory & Cognition 36(1), 201-216. [https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.1.201]
  • Tabor, W., B. Galantucci and D. Richardson. 2004. Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language 50(4), 355-370. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2004.01.001]
  • Tanner, D., J. Nicol and L. Brehm. 2014. The time-course of feature interference in agreement comprehension: Multiple mechanisms and asymmetrical attraction. Journal of Memory and Language 76, 195-215. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.07.003]
  • Van Dyke, J. A. 2007. Interference effects from grammatically unavailable constituents during sentence processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 33(2), 407-430. [https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.33.2.407]
  • Van Dyke, J. A. and R. L. Lewis. 2003. Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment and repair: A cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalyzed ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language 49(3), 285-316. [https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00081-0]
  • Van Dyke, J. A. and B. McElree. 2006. Retrieval interference in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 55, 157-166. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2006.03.007]
  • Van Gompel, R. P., M. J. Pickering and M. J. Traxler. 2000. Unrestricted race: A new model of syntactic ambiguity resolution. In A. Kennedy, R. Radach, D. Heller and J. Pynte, eds., Reading as a Perceptual Process, 621-648. Amsterdam, Netherlands: North-Holland. [https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-008043642-5/50029-2]
  • Wagers, M. W., E. F. Lau and C. Phillips. 2009. Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes. Journal of Memory and Language 61, 206-237. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2009.04.002]
  • Wagers, M. W. and C. Phillips. 2014. Going the distance: Memory and control processes in active dependency construction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 67(7), 1274-1304. [https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2013.858363]
  • Witzel, J. and K. Forster. 2014. Lexical co-occurrence and ambiguity resolution. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 29(2), 158-185. [https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2012.748925]
  • Zehr, J. and F. Schwarz. 2018. PennController for Internet Based Experiments (IBEX).