Two eye-tracking experiments and two self-paced reading experiments investigated processing of sentences containing reduced relative clauses. Processing of a reduced relative is facilitated when it is preceded by a sentence that has the same syntactic structure, as long as the preceding sentence contains the same critical verb as the target…

Focuses on the brain's response to one aspect of syntactic processing--the processing of sentences that violate constraints on constituent movement. Findings indicate that movement constraints can be applied during the earliest stages of sentence processing, perhaps in conjunction with the creation of phrase structure. (46 references) (Author/CK)