The Impact of Verb Type on the Variability of the Comp-Trace Effect

The C-t effect has been extensively researched with regards to its variability, however, matrix verbs have not generally been taken into account. The present study investigates whether verbs believe, doubt, know, realize, say and think differ in the strength of the C-t effect they induce— exploring syntactic analyses, epistemicity and grammaticalization to possibly identify what characteristics of verbs dictate the strength of the C-t effect. Subjects (n=44) were asked to complete 1 of 2 Grammaticality Judgement Tasks (GJT), which asked them to rate the grammaticality of items which included matched items with that involving both subject extractions, constructions without extractions, and extractions with the complementizer whether. The results demonstrated that verbs believe, say and think induced a stronger effect than was observed for know, realize, and doubt. Thus, the data supports the idea that the verbs with the most epistemic sense, induce a stronger effect with the least variability