Abstract
Japanese double-gap relative clause constructions contain two gaps and two modified nouns. The two gap-noun dependencies can be nested or crossed. The results of a questionnaire and a self-paced reading experiment are reported indicating that nested dependencies are easier to understand than crossed ones in this construction. First, the result is the opposite of what has been reported for nested dependencies in German compared to crossed dependencies in Dutch (Bach, Brown, & Marslen-Wilson, 1986). We argue that this contrast is likely to be related to the comprehension of single-gap relative clauses in Japanese, which have also been claimed to present unexpected comprehension patterns compared to their counterparts in various other languages. Second, the results support previous observations that crossed as well as nested dependencies are grammatical in double-gap relative clauses (contra Fodor, 1978). Third, we discuss how the word-by-word processing of double-gap relative clauses can be explained based on the recursive application of the algorithm commonly assumed for the processing of single-gap relative clauses in Japanese.
