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Abstract:
A great deal of work has been done on how attachment of
relative clauses to a preceding complex NP (N1 of N2) takes place
in different languages. In the original research done on this
question, Cuetos and Mitchell (1988) provided evidence that
British English speakers, given sentences like "the daughter of
the colonel who was on the balcony," preferred to interpret the
relative clause "who was on the balcony" as modifying the second
noun, N2 ("colonel"). Spanish speakers, on the other hand,
preferred to interpret the Spanish equivalent as modifying the
first noun, N1 ("daughter"). Several reading time experiments
following Cuetos and Mitchell and using materials disambiguated
toward N1 or toward N2 interpretations have reported faster
reading times for high attachment (N1) in Spanish, French, Dutch,
and German, among other languages. Reading time experiments have
generally reported a null effect for English, with one report
(Henstra, 1996) of a low attachment (N2) advantage.
All of the reported experiments in Spanish have used
self-paced reading tasks. It has been suggested that the high
attachment preference for Spanish could be produced by the way
the materials were segmented in the self-paced reading tasks.
Gilboy and Sopena (1996) showed that the high attachment
preference was limited to the case where the entire "N1 of N2"
complex was presented as a single unit. In order to determine
preferences in normal reading, without segmentation influences
and without irrelevant differences in sentence content across
languages, we carried out three eyetracking experiments, one in
English and two in Spanish, using sentences that were literal
translations across the languages. The results showed that
English subjects read the relative clause more rapidly when it
was disambiguated toward low attachment (N2) than to high
attachment (N1), whereas the reverse effect was found for the
Spanish subjects. The effects appeared primarily in total reading
time, although first pass time effects were significant in
English. These results, which avoid segmentation artifacts, will
be discussed in relation to current models of parsing.
Cuetos, F., and Mitchell, D. C. (1988). "Cross-linguistic
differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the Late
Closure strategy in Spanish."
Cognition,
30, 73-105.
Gilboy, E. and Sopena, J. M. (1996). "Segmentation effects in
the processing of complex noun pronouns with relative clauses."
In M. Carreiras, J. E. Garcia-Albea and N. Sebastian (Eds.),
Language processing in Spanish.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Henstra, J. (1996). "Relative clause attachment in English:
Eye-tracking versus self-paced reading." Poster presented at
AMLaP-96, Turino, Italy, Sept 20-21.
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