The concept of economy has been expressed in many different ways in the theories of Minimalist Program. Among them is phase which is a domain where all the elements are subject to Transfer to PF interface. In cases, however, when an element should escape from this, it undergoes internal Merge to the outer edge of the phase. This part of theory has been long discussed in terms of locality, requiring that derivation be as local as possible at any stage of computation. One of the empirical evidence to prove this is based on the instances of connectivity in long-distance dependencies. The purpose of this paper is to show that connectivity is observed psychologically as well in language processing. To do this, this paper uses a word-by-word self-paced noncumulative reading task controlled by Eprime (v. 1.02) on an IBM compatible computer. It is predicted that the response time at the area where a phase is supposed to exist is slower than the response time elsewhere. This prediction is confirmed.
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical Preliminaries
3. Phases
4. Experiments
5. Conclusion