Attachment Preference in Auditory German Sentences: Individual Differences and Pragmatic Strategy.

Eleanor E Harding,Daniela Sammler,Sonja A Kotz

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01357

Eleanor E Harding, Daniela Sammler + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01357

Copy DOI

Abstract

Relative clauses modify a preceding element, but as this element can be flexibly located, the point of attachment is sometimes ambiguous. Preference for this attachment can vary within languages such as German, yet explanations for differences in attachment preference related to cognitive strategies or constraints have been conflicting in the current literature. The present study aimed to assess the preference for relative clause attachment among German listeners and whether these preferences could be explained by strategy or individual differences in working memory or musical rhythm ability. We performed a sentence completion experiment, conducted post hoc interviews, and measured working memory and rhythm abilities with diagnostic tests. German listeners had no homogeneous attachment preference, although participants consistently completed individual sentences across trials according to the general preference that they reported offline. Differences in attachment preference were moreover not linked to individual differences in either working memory or musical rhythm ability. However, the pragmatic content of individual sentences sometimes overrode the general syntactic preference in participants with lower rhythm ability. Our study makes an important contribution to the field of psycholinguistics by validating offline self-reports as a reliable diagnostic for an individual’s online relative clause attachment preference. The link between pragmatic strategy and rhythm ability is an interesting direction for future research.

Highlights

Ambiguous relative clause attachment—a modification that could be plausibly attached to more than one preceding linguistic element—is a standing cross-linguistic enigma, and the field of psycholinguistics can benefit by explaining variability in the processing of attachment ambiguity during comprehension
While verbal working memory had no impact on attachment preference, we found that rhythm ability correlated with a pragmatic ambiguity resolution strategy that was discovered in the post hoc interviews
Results showed that participants were reliably able to offline-report their own relative clause attachment preference and to reliably assess whether they used a pragmatic strategy

Summary

Introduction

Ambiguous relative clause attachment—a modification that could be plausibly attached to more than one preceding linguistic element—is a standing cross-linguistic enigma (see Sanz et al, 2013), and the field of psycholinguistics can benefit by explaining variability in the processing of attachment ambiguity during comprehension. A caveat for such investigations is that native speakers of the same language can have different preferences for the general “naturalness” of the same syntactic attachments (e.g., Augurzky, 2006). A large portion of related investigation into the underlying causes of individual differences in attachment preferences has focused on working memory capacity, but has produced mixed results across the literature (Hocking, 2003; Swets et al, 2007; Traxler, 2007; Caplan and Waters, 2013). Individual Differences in Preference Attachment language comprehension (e.g., Tierney and Kraus, 2014; Gordon et al, 2015a), suggesting the usefulness of including a musical rhythm metric along with a traditional working memory metric when investigating the processing of ambiguous syntactic attachment. To establish a reliable way to determine individual native-speaker preference for ambiguous syntactic attachment, for use in future psycholinguistic studies about syntactic ambiguity comprehension. To test the explanatory power of working memory and rhythm ability where differences in attachment preferences occurred

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion