Filler driven parsing: A study of gap filling in dutch

Abstract

Simple Dutch declaratives and questions were presented in a grammaticality judgment task to assess the validity of the “active filler strategy” (AFS). The AFS predicts that moved constituents, such as the initial constituent of a Dutch sentence, will be assigned to the leftmost possible gap. This results in better performance on subject-initial than on object-initial sentences. These predictions were confirmed, supporting a “filler” driven account of gap filling where gaps may be postulated before or without identifying a missing constituent in the input string. The results argue against the existence of a bottom-up parser in which the presence of a gap is detected only when lexically present local phrases have been parsed.