우리 영문과에서 EGEP 해외 석학으로 모신 

Simon Fraser 대학 언어학과 한정혜(Chung-hye Han) 교수님의 특강이 다음과 같이 열리니, 학생 여러분의 많은 관심 바랍니다.

시간: 2026년 7월2일 11:00

장소: 이화여대 학관 413호 (온라인 https://ewha.zoom.us/j/5019788393) 

Title: Resumptive pronouns in English link with fillers in incremental processing

Resumptive pronouns (RPs) in English have consistently been shown to be unacceptable in acceptability judgment studies. 

However, in reading studies, RPs have been shown to lead to faster reading times compared to gaps. There are two competing interpretations of the fast reading times of RPs. 

Under one view, RPs facilitate dependency formation with fillers in on-line processing (Dickey, 1996; Hofmeister & Norcliffe, 2013; Hammerly, 2022). 

Under the other view, RPs are read fast because they are shallowly processed and not fully integrated (Morgan & Wagers, 2018; Morgan et al., 2020). 

In this talk, I present two reading time studies using the Maze task with the gender-mismatch paradigm that tested whether RPs in complex relative clauses establish dependencies with head nouns in incremental processing, and an off-line comprehension study that compared the comprehension of RPs and gaps. The findings show that (i) RPs form dependencies with head nouns in on-line processing; (ii) dependency formation is easier across islands than across non-islands; and (iii) sentences containing RPs exhibit enhanced comprehension versus sentences containing gaps. 

These findings suggest that even though RPs may not improve sentence acceptability, the language processor is using them in real time to make connections with fillers, and these connections are especially facilitated in islands, resulting in enhanced comprehension.