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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).

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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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