Levy & Keller 2013 (Expectation and locality effects in German verb-final structures. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(2), 199-222) showed that in German, expectation effects (facilitation in reading) are seen when the verb's appearance is delayed in a clause final construction, but that locality effects (slowdown in reading) is seen when the target phrase is embedded inside a relative clause. The interpretation was that in syntactic complex environments, locality effects will dominate (due to high memory load), and relatively simpler syntactic environments, surprisal effects will dominate.
Using both self-paced reading and their original methodology, eyetracking, we carried out six unsuccessful replication attempts to attempt to reproduce these effects. We attribute this failure to replicate to the low sample sizes in the original studies (28 subjects) as well as in our own replication attempts. In future work we plan to run a much larger sample size study.