Existing evidence suggests that the parser avoids positing a movement dependency if the grammar does not require doing so. By investigating the processing of two syntactic ambiguities that have not been the subject of processing studies before, we provide more conclusive evidence for this parsing bias in two Romance languages: French and Italian. In two acceptability-judgment experiments and two self-paced-reading studies, we found that sentences that involved a filler–gap dependency (indirect questions in Italian and free relatives in French) were dispreferred compared to sentences involving the same lexical material but no filler–gap dependency (declarative complement clauses in both languages). Crucially, the filler–gap dependency was not dispreferred when there was no available competitor. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these results for syntactic theory, in particular for the questionable status of Merge over Move as a grammatical principle.

中文翻译：

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避免浪漫中的空白：来自意大利和法国的结构解析原则证据

现有证据表明，如果语法不需要这样做，则解析器避免放置运动依赖项。通过研究以前没有进行过加工研究的两个句法歧义的处理，我们以两种浪漫语言（法语和意大利语）为这种解析偏倚提供了更确凿的证据。在两个可接受性判断实验和两个自定进度的阅读研究中，我们发现与具有相同词汇材料但没有填充词的句子相比，不喜欢包含填充词-空白依赖的句子（意大利语中的间接问题和法语中的自由亲属） –gap依赖性（两种语言中的声明性补全子句）。至关重要的是，在没有可用竞争者的情况下，对填充物-缺口的依赖性也不是不受欢迎的。