Figure 1.

Event‐related brain potentials elicited by object wh‐questions (dashed line) as compared to subject wh‐questions (solid line) for questions with a short (left) or a long (right) distance between the dislocated element and the second noun phrase. Figure adapted from Fiebach [ 2001]. ERPs represent averaged data from 14 participants. Negative voltages are plotted upward. Experimental procedures, data acquisition, and data analysis were equivalent to procedures described in the ERP study of Fiebach et al. [ 2002]. The statistical analysis in the time window of 1,000–3,400 ms (in which the sustained negativity was observed for the Long‐object questions and that was also used in Fiebach et al. [ 2002]) indicates an interaction of word order and length (F[1,13] = 5.79; P < 0.05) that was resolved to show a significant negativity only for the Long‐object sentences (F[1,13] = 13.82; P < 0.005). ERPs to Short‐subject and Short‐object sentences did not differ in this time window (F < 0.5). Analysis of behavioral results indicates that responses to object wh‐questions took 46 ms longer than did responses to subject wh‐questions (F[1,13] = 6.39; P < 0.05), and that more errors were made for object than for subject questions (F[1,13] = 7.22; P < 0.05). Although there was a considerable difference in this effect between short questions (2.2% more errors in object than in subject questions) and long questions (5.2% more errors in object questions), the interaction of sentence type and length did not reach significance (F[1,13] = 2.27; P = 0.16).