Abstract
A sensible assumption in psycholinguistics is that universal principles of optimal computation guide structural decisions made during sentence processing. This idea was questioned by the apparent cross-linguistic variation in Relative Clause attachment: a wealth of experimental results from the nineties showed that speakers of Spanish, among other languages, more readily converged towards the least optimal structural resolution (i.e. non-local attachment) challenging the universality of parsing principles of locality. A more recent development in this literature demonstrated that previous results were confounded by the availability of an additional parse, the so-called Pseudo-Relative, in the ill-behaved languages (Grillo 2012; Grillo & Costa 2014). Grillo and colleagues further suggested that the parser more readily disambiguates in favour of the Pseudo-Relative reading, when possible, because of its structural and interpretive simplicity in comparison to Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment is a direct consequence of this independent preference. We present novel results in support of this account from two offline forced-choice attachment questionnaires in Spanish. The results show that Pseudo-Relative availability significantly affects attachment preferences and that cross-linguistic variation in Relative Clause attachment is likely to be epiphenomenal and largely attributable to underlying grammatical differences.
Highlights
Strategies for minimizing computational load have been proposed for both type of processes together with a great wealth of empirical support showing better comprehension and faster processing times for structures involving simpler structures/interpretations over more complex ones and more local dependencies over long distance ones
We presented novel evidence from Spanish supporting the universality of principles of locality and minimal structure
When the availability of PR parse is controlled for, Spanish speakers show a clear preference for local attachment of Relative Clause (RC)
Summary
Economy principles of this sort have been very successful in accounting for observed parsing preferences in structure building and dependency formation processes. In this paper we discuss the complex interaction of these two types of economy principles, i.e. locality and minimal structure, in the domain of Relative Clause (RC) attachment ambiguities (1), which have previously been claimed to be processed differently across languages (Cuetos & Mitchell 1988; Grillo & Costa 2014) This vast literature painted a troubling asymmetry between speakers of well-behaved languages (e.g. English, Basque, Chinese), who displayed a preference for attaching the RC to the most local DP (1a), and speakers of “ill-behaved” languages like Spanish, Greek and Dutch, who displayed a surprising preference for attaching the RC non-locally (1b). John saw [DP the servanti [PP of the [actressj[CP that wasj on the balcony]]
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