To appear in the journal _Language_.
ABSTRACT
In the verb-initial language Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands, wh-dependencies exhibit a special verbal inflection known as Wh-Agreement: verbs along the path of the wh-dependency are inflected for the grammatical relation of the gap and the intermediate landing sites of the filler. Two on-line comprehension experiments conducted in the Northern Mariana Islands reveal that the morphological paradigm of Wh-Agreement affects the timing of dependency formation and interpretation in this language. Overt Wh- Agreement facilitates the formation of a wh-dependency. However, when overt Wh- Agreement could occur but does not, its absence delays and attenuates wh-dependency formation. In short, morphological information exerts a powerful influence on the unfolding parse, one which has temporal priority over syntactic information, such as word order, and semantic information, such as argument structure.