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Argument-head distance and processing complexity: Explaining both locality and antilocality effects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Shravan Vasishth  and
Richard L. Lewis
Shravan Vasishth*
Affiliation:
Potsdam University
Richard L. Lewis*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
*
Institute for Linguistics, Potsdam University, Germany, [vasishth@acm.org]
Institute for Linguistics, Potsdam University, Germany, [vasishth@acm.org]
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Abstract

Although proximity between arguments and verbs (locality) is a relatively robust determinant of sentence-processing difficulty (Hawkins 1998, 2001, Gibson 2000), increasing argument-verb distance can also facilitate processing (Konieczny 2000). We present two self-paced reading (SPR) experiments involving Hindi that provide further evidence of antilocality, and a third SPR experiment which suggests that similarity-based interference can attenuate this distance-based facilitation. A unified explanation of interference, locality, and antilocality effects is proposed via an independently motivated theory of activation decay and retrieval interference (Anderson et al. 2004).

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 82 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 767 - 794
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

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