An investigation of syntactic, morphological, and semantic cues in processing sluicing in Turkish

This study investigated cue-based retrieval during the processing of sluicing dependencies in Turkish, examining the effect of similarity-based interference from syntactically, morphologically, and semantically similar distractors in antecedent retrieval. It also examined the roles of linear and syntactic distance. The methodology involved two eye-tracking experiments and a sentence completion task. The eye-tracking experiments investigated the effects of morphological and semantic similarity and the influence of linear and syntactic distance on antecedent retrieval during the real-time processing of sluicing. The sentence completion task assessed how linear and syntactic distance influenced sentence-final judgments of antecedent preferences. Results from the eye-tracking experiments revealed an increased processing difficulty for linearly and syntactically distant antecedents in real-time processing of sluicing. Results also showed that morphologically similar distractors often facilitated processing, particularly when the target was less accessible, and primarily in the earlier stages of processing. In contrast, semantically similar distractors generally had an inhibitory effect, which mostly emerged later. The sentence completion task further demonstrated sensitivity to linear and syntactic distance, with participants showing a higher preference for linearly and syntactically closer antecedents in sentence-final interpretations. Overall, the findings aligned with the predictions of the cue-based memory retrieval model (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) and extended them to the processing of sluicing in Turkish.