Abstract
An eye-tracking and an electrophysiological experiment using a sentence/picture matching task were carried out in order to assess whether there would be significant differences between semantic restrictiveness properties of Prepositional Phrases (PPs) vis-à-vis those of Relative Clauses (RCs), attached as modifiers respectively to a local PP or to a non-local DP (e.g. the horse with the parrot with brown spots/the horse with the parrot that has brown spots). Two hypotheses were entertained, namely, (i) an operator construction such as an RC would be construed non-locally, that is, would attach high as a default, even if there is semantic bias attracting it to a low attachment; (ii) a light constituent (PP) has no prosodic autonomy and will be more available to local attachment and therefore would tend to attach locally as a default, even if there is semantic bias attracting it to a high attachment. Results in both experiments were in favor of the hypotheses and we speculate whether they could be more deeply grounded into the representational alternatives projected by linguistic theory itself.
Highlights
Results from sentence processing studies using a wide range of psycholinguistic methods have shown that on-line parsing involves accessing and rapidly integrating various types of structural and non-structural information during comprehension (Cf. Gibson & Pearlmutter, 1998, for review)
Following from this, a set of stronger hypotheses hold that the preferences will not change even if we introduce semantic bias in the opposite direction of the default: (i’) an operator construction such as an Relative Clause (RC) will be construed non-locally, that is, will attach high as a default, even if there is semantic bias attracting it to a low attachment; (ii’) a light constituent (PP) has no prosodic autonomy and will be more available to local attachment and will tend to attach locally as a default, even if there is semantic bias attracting it to a high attachment
The Late Closure Principle (Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Frazier, 1979)4 is a universal principle of cognitive economy which predicts that a low or local analysis of a structurally ambiguous construction is to be preferred to a high or non-local attachment, even though the grammar may license both analyses, as it is the case in the Prepositional Phrases (PPs) constructions here
Summary
Results from sentence processing studies using a wide range of psycholinguistic methods have shown that on-line parsing involves accessing and rapidly integrating various types of structural and non-structural information during comprehension (Cf. Gibson & Pearlmutter, 1998, for review). A sentence such as (i) That is the horse with the parrot that has brown spots is ambiguous because the Relative Clause (RC), that has brown spots, is preceded by a complex DP, the horse with the parrot and, it could be attached either to the first DP, the horse, or to the second one, the parrot If it is unclear whether it is the horse or the parrot that has brown spots, especially because there is nothing in one’s world knowledge to define a preference in this case, the parsing choice, if any, could be ascribed to structural factors that might facilitate low or high attachment of materials. Carefully controlling the semantics in ambiguous sentences seems to be a reasonable experimental path to follow if one wants to disclose the speakersdisambiguation criteria
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