Grammar and Expectation in Active Dependency Resolution: Experimental and Modeling Evidence from Norwegian

Filler-gap dependency resolution is often characterized as an active process. We probed the mechanisms that determine where and why comprehenders posit gaps during incremental processing using Norwegian as our test language. First, we investigated why active filler-gap dependency resolution is suspended inside island domains like embedded questions in some languages. Processing-based accounts hold that resource limitations prevent gap-filling in embedded questions across languages, while grammar-based accounts predict that active gap-filling is only blocked in languages where embedded questions are grammatical islands. In a self-paced reading study, we find that Norwegian participants exhibit filled-gap effects inside embedded questions, which are not islands in the language. The findings are consistent with grammar-based, but not processing, accounts. Second, we asked if active filler-gap processing can be understood as a special case of probabilistic ambiguity resolution within an expectation-based framework. To do so, we tested whether word-by-word surprisal values from a neural language model could predict the location and magnitude of filled-gap effects in our behavioral data. We find that surprisal accurately tracks the location of filled-gap effects but severely underestimates their magnitude. This suggests either that mechanisms above and beyond probabilistic ambiguity resolution are required to fully explain active gap-filling behavior or that surprisal values derived from long-short term memory are not good proxies for humans' incremental expectations during filler-gap resolution.