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Abstract:
A good deal of recent work has been devoted to the study of
relative clause attachment ambiguities across languages, both
visually and auditorily. Various hypotheses have been made to
account for attachment decisions, including the "same size sister''
principle (Fodor, 1998), recency preference and predicate proximity
(Gibson et al., 1996), focus attraction (Schafer et al., 1996), and
focus attraction in combination with prosodic breaks (Maynell,
1999).
This study builds on previous work in examining the influence of
pitch accents, prosodic breaks and relative pronoun choice on the
attachment of English relative clauses to complex noun phrases of
the type NP1 of NP2. An example sentence is given in (1).
(1) The zoning board rejected the door of the building //
{that/which} was bright yellow.
Pitch accents were placed on either NP1 (the door) or NP2 (the
building). A full intonational phrase break was either present or
absent following NP2 and preceding the relative clause (marked with
// in (1)), and relative pronoun choice was manipulated as well
(that vs. which/who).
Preliminary results show that in general, the presence of a full
intonational phrase break following NP2 and preceding the relative
clause led to high attachment of the relative clause, and within
this condition placement of a pitch accent significantly influenced
NP choice (using wh-pronouns: F1(1,54)=12.81, p<0.002,
F2(1,13)=19.85, p<0.002; using ``that'' relatives:
F1(1,54)=8.34, p<0.006; F2(1,13)=3.55, p<0.083). There was
also a main effect of pronoun type, though by items only. In the
absence of an intonational phrase break, pitch accent placement was
significant for that-relatives, but not for wh-relatives. Also,
absence of a full intonational phrase break appears to induce N2
attachment, especially for ``that''-relatives.
The results suggest that multiple factors contribute to relative
clause attachment decisions in a two - site context. The results
will be considered in view of prosodic structure and the hypotheses
cited above. In addition, plausibility concerns are addressed.
Fodor, J. D. (1998) Learning to Parse. J. Psycholinguistic
Research 21 (5) 1303-1321.
Gibson, E. Pearlmutter, N., Canseco-Gonzalez, E., & Hickok, G.
(1996) Recency preference in the human sentence processing
mechanism. Cognition 59, 23-59.
Maynell, L.A. (1999) Effect of pitch accent placement on resolving
relative clause ambiguity in English. Poster presented at the 12th
Annual CUNY conference on Human Sentence Processing.
Schafer, A., Carter, J., Clifton Jr., C., and Frazier, L. (1996).
Focus in Relative Clause Construal. Language and Cognitive
Processes11, 135-163.
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