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Abstract:
Preference patterns found for relative clause attachment
ambiguities in sentences like (1) have been attributed to a variety
of constraints.
(1) The cook of the lawyer who had a flu ...
The attachment-binding dualism proposed by Hemforth, Konieczny,
& Scheepers, 2000, in press) tries to explain the preference
patterns established for different kinds of modifiers within and
between languages by the kinds of processes involved in
RC-attachment. On the one hand, RCs are assumed to be attached to
the partial phrase marker of the sentence. On the other hand, the
relative pronoun has to be bound to a suitable antecedent. The
first process is syntactic in nature and supposed to follow a
locality principle whereas a pronoun is assumed to be
preferentially bound to the most accessible antecedent which is
usually not the most recent one but the most salient one (saliency
being determined by discourse status, thematic status, pitch accent
etc.).
In a series of experiments, we are currently investigating in
how far the accessibility of potential antecedents can be
influenced by reactivation processes. We make use of a variant of
the fast priming paradigm (Sereno, 1995, Kim & Trueswell,
1999), assuming that potential antecedents are reactivated by the
presentation of identical or highly associated primes.In a
self-paced reading moving window experiment, we presented subjects
with sentences like 2 a,b).
(2)
a. Die Professorin(sg) / der Studenten(pl), / die sehr / jung
war(sg) / und viel forschte, ...
The professor of the students who was very young and did a lot of
research, ...
b. Die Studenten(pl) / der Professorin(sg), / die sehr / jung
war(sg) / und viel forschte, ...
The students of the professor, who was very young and did a lot of
research, ...
The sentences were ambiguous up to the verb which agreed in
number with either NP1 (2a) or NP2 (2b). When subjects pressed a
button after reading the second NP ("der Studenten" in 2a, "der
Professorin" in 2b), we presented a prime for 38.5 ms before the
first two words of the RC appeared on the screen. The prime was
then replaced by the beginning of the RC ("die sehr").Our
predictions for the three versions of primes (repetition of N1,
repetition of N2, or presentation of a series of Xs) were as
following: The basic N1-attachment preference that was established
for German before (Hemforth, Konieczny, & Scheepers, 2000)
should show up in the neutral case (Xs), this preference should
increase with repetition of N1 and decrease with repetition of N2.
Reading times on the disambiguating region ("jung war") show
exactly the expected pattern.We are currently running follow up
experiments using highly associated primes. In further experiments
we will apply the fast priming technique to attachment decisions in
globally ambiguous sentences. The results from these experiments
will be part of the presentation.
Hemforth, B., Konieczny, L., & Scheepers, C. (in press).
Modifier attachment: relative clauses and coordinations.
Manuscript: University of Freiburg.
Hemforth, B., Konieczny, L., & Scheepers, C. (2000). Syntactic
attachment and anaphor resolution: two sides of relative clause
attachment. In M. Crocker, M. Pickering &, C. Clifton, jr.
(Eds.), Architectures and mechanisms of language processing.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kim, A.E., & Trueswell, J.C. (1999). Fast priming of verb
argument structure in the direct-object/intransitive ambiguitiy.
Paper presented at the 5th annula conference on Architectures and
Mechanisms for Language Processing, Edinburgh, September 23-25,
1999.
Sereno, S. (1995). Resolution of lexical ambiguity: Evidence from
an eye movement priming paradigm. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 21, 582-595.
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