Revisiting processing complexity of nested and cross-serial dependencies
Himanshu Yadav, Stefan Leo Frank, Richard Futrell, Samar Husain · Glossa Psycholinguistics · 2025
In two web-based experiments, we compare comprehension difficulty between Dutch and German sentences with clusters of two or three verbs. In Dutch, such sentences involve crossing dependencies, whereas these dependencies are nested in German. Replicating the seminal finding of Bach et al. (1986), we find that the crossing (Dutch) structure is easier to comprehend than the nested (German) structure, although we find a different pattern of results in terms of where this difficulty manifests. The results are in line with predictions from the Dependency Locality Theory.