Intervention effects and processing effort
Eun-Ju Noh · 언어와 언어학 · 2011
It has been claimed that an intervener such as NP-man ‘NP-only’ cannot precede the Wh-word in a Wh-question in Korean. If the Wh-word scrambles over the intervener, the sentence becomes grammatical. It has also been claimed that the intervention effect disappears or weakens in why-questions. Linguists have provided accounts on the basis of their own judgments or at most with the agreement of several informants. There have been few experiments to examine ordinary speakers production of sentences involving the intervention effect. This paper conducted such an experiment to fill this gap. The result helps determine whether the general assumptions are correct, and which of the existing accounts can better deal with ordinary speakers production of Wh-questions with an intervener.