Animacy in processing relative clauses: The hikers that rocks crush

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Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence (2007, background): “Their findings suggest that the presence of an inanimate noun phrase in the relative clause increases the processing difficulty in object relatives (for an extended discussion, see Mak et al., 2006; Traxler et al., 2002).”
Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses (2007, background): “Mak et al. (2006) and Traxler et al. (2005) have both shown that the similarity-based approach does not predict patterns of processing difficulty in adults, since, crucially, object relatives that have an animate head and an inanimate RC subject (e.g., the dog that the ball hit ) are not easier…”
The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Active versus passive representations (2007, background): “ Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2006) proposed that when animacy coincides with topicality (givenness), it is used at the earliest stage of analysis.”