Studies from many languages consistently report that subject relative clauses (SR) are eas-ier to process than object relatives (OR). However, Hsiao and Gibson (2003) report an ORpreference for Chinese, a finding that has been contested. Here we report faster OR versusSR processing in Basque, an ergative, head-final language with pre-nominal relativeclauses. A self-paced reading task was used in Experiments 1 and 2, while ERPs wererecorded in Experiment 3. We used relative clauses that were ambiguous between anobject or subject-gap interpretation and disambiguated later in the sentence. The resultsof Experiments 1 and 2 showed that SR took longer to read than OR in the critical disam-biguating region. In addition, Experiment 3 showed that SR produced larger amplitudesthan OR in the P600 window immediately after reading the critical disambiguating word.Our results suggest that SR are not universally easier to process. They cast doubts on uni-versal hypotheses and suggest that processing complexity may depend on language-spe-cific aspects of grammar.
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