Ungrammatical double center-embedding (DCE) sentences missing one of their three VPs (“missing VP sentences”) can produce illusions of grammaticality in certain languages, e.g. the English ungrammatical sentence *The novel the author the company fired was banned is perceived by native speakers as relatively acceptable, although the equivalent German ungrammatical sentence is not. A recent theory has sought to explain the grammaticality illusion and its cross-linguistic distribution by appealing to language statistics (differences in word order frequencies). In this presentation, I discuss this theory with reference to experiments involving Mandarin Chinese “missing NP sentences,” where DCE sentences are ungrammatical because they lack one of three head NPs (joint work with Colin Phillips).

Given Mandarin Chinese’s word order, the language statistics account predicts that Mandarin should not have the illusion, i.e. Mandarin speakers should find missing NP sentences to be less acceptable and/or experience difficulties in reading them, compared with their grammatical DCE counterparts. However, contrary to predictions, offline and online behavioral experiments (acceptability judgments and self-paced reading) show that Mandarin ungrammatical missing NP sentences are more acceptable and read faster. A stops-making-sense experiment, investigating the timecourse of how Mandarin illusory sentences are processed, further points in favor of an interference-based account, where the cross-linguistic distribution of the illusion reflects differences in how the parser represents DCE sentences.