Evrensel bir çözümleyici ya da dile özgü çözümleme stratejileri: Türkçe’de ilgi tümcelerini isim tamlamalarında tamlayan ya da tamlanan ile bağlama tercihleri

Abstract

This study investigated syntactic priming of
 relative clause (RC) attachment preferences in monolingual Turkish speakers
 through a series of experiments. Cross-linguistic variations in RC attachment
 preferences have implied that parsing strategies may not be guided by universal
 principles but language-specific parameters. Thus, several models put forth
 their assumptions about the universality of the parser and the underlying
 mechanisms working in the initial analysis, and the sources of information used
 in sentence processing.  However, there
 is not one single model, the predictions of which could account for all the
 contradictory findings obtained in a myriad of studies using different
 materials and tasks in different languages. In order to investigate RC
 attachment preferences further in detail, we conducted two offline
 (pen-and-paper) tasks and an online (self-paced reading) task. The results
 showed that monolingual Turkish speakers had no clear attachment preferences on
 condition that several confounding factors were controlled. More precisely, RC
 attachment preferences varied depending on the semantic factors (e.g. semantic
 associations of the host NP with the proximal and the distal predicate), task
 requirements (e.g. implicit or directed), and techniques (e.g. offline or
 online) employed in the studies. Nonetheless, the effect of syntactic priming
 showed that monolingual Turkish speakers distinguished the tree hierarchical
 configuration of the alternative attachment interpretations. Furthermore, the
 results suggested that a tendency towards NP1 attachment preference might be
 attributed to processing difficulty, as a strategy to minimize cognitive
 demand, arising from conditions such as structural complexity (active vs.
 passive), task requirements, and research design (offline vs. online, or
 directed attention vs. implicit processing).