Short-term forgetting in sentence comprehension: crosslinguistic evidence from verb-final structures

Seven experiments using self-paced reading and eyetracking suggest that omitting the middle verb in a double center embedding leads to easier pro-cessing in English but leads to greater difficulty in German. One commonly accepted explanation for the English pattern—based on data from offline acceptability ratings and due to Gibson & Thomas (1999)—is that working-memory overload leads the comprehender to forget the prediction of the upcoming verb phrase (VP), which reduces working memory load. We show that this VP-forgetting hypothesis does an excellent job of explaining the English data, but cannot account for the German results. We argue that the English and German results can be explained by the parser’s adapta-tion to the grammatical properties of the languages: in contrast to English, German subordinate clauses always have the verb in clause-final position, and this property of German may lead the German parser to maintain pre-dictions of upcoming verb phrases more robustly compared to English. Th