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Abstract:
Referential context effects during the parsing of
syntactically ambiguous sentences have been studied mainly in
English, and the issue of their immediate effects on syntactic
decisions remains open. The subject vs. object relative clause
ambiguity in German is a good test bed for examining this issue
because it allows the extension of the range of ambiguities
studied. A further advantage of studying this German ambiguity is
that the two relative clauses are identical up to the clause-final
verb which is marked for number (e.g.,
hatte
vs.
hatten),
signalling either a subject relative (1) or an object relative
(2):
As reported in a poster presentation at the Eleventh Annual CUNY
Conference on Human Sentence Processing (Lipka, 1998), a novel kind
of referential context manipulation was found to override the usual
preference for subject-relatives over object-relatives in off-line
judgement and production data. New data from two on-line reading
studies using a word-by-word non-cumulative moving window paradigm
further support the referential context hypothesis: following a
supporting context, object-relatives were no more difficult than
subject-relatives. However, this was only the case for a group of
subjects who had to answer some comprehension questions focussing
on the referentially relevant information given in the contexts (in
25% of the trials). For another group of subjects, who received no
such questions, there were main effects of context and sentence
type, but no interaction, that is, object-relatives remained more
difficult than subject-relatives even in the supporting-context
condition. These results suggest that referential context effects
reported previously for several types of ambiguity in English also
hold for the subject versus object relative ambiguity in German.
However, the results also clearly demonstrate that subtle changes
in task demands can affect the availability and use of referential
information.
Reference
Lipka, S. (1998). Referential context and the resolution of
subject/object relative clause ambiguities in German. Poster
presented at the Eleventh Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
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