Quantification at a distance and grammatical illusions in French

Recent research in psycholinguistics supports the hypothesis that retrieval from working memory is a key component of establishing syntactic dependencies in comprehension. This can result in so-called grammatical illusions. These illusions have been modeled as the result of a content-addressable retrieval process in sentence comprehension that allows grammatically inaccessible licensing elements to be reactivated, creating a spurious perception of acceptability. This article reports five studies that establish the existence of a new grammatical illusion involving quantification at a distance and the licensing of so-called de NPs in French. Our results suggest that this grammatical illusion is interestingly constrained by syntactic properties of the licensors. Specifically, quantifiers that independently participate in quantification-at-a-distance constructions were seen to create grammatical illusions to a greater extent than quantifiers that do not participate in that construction. Consistent with previous work on the nature of cues in memory retrieval, we suggest that this is the result of fairly specific abstract syntactic cues that guide retrieval of a licensing element. This article thus brings further evidence that syntax is crucially used to structure working memory over the course of a parse.