Relative Clause Attachment Preferences Research Articles

The relationship between working memory capacity, bilingualism, and ambiguous relative clause attachment.

Working memory (WM) capacity has been shown to influence how readers resolve syntactic ambiguities. Building on the work of Swets et al. (2007, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136[1], 64-81), the goal of the present study was to assess the effects of working memory and language proficiency on first language (L1) relative clause attachment decisions across three different language samples: English monolinguals, L1-L2 Spanish-English heritage bilinguals, and L1-L2 Mandarin-English bilinguals. Binomial logistic regression analyses demonstrated that low WM span is associated with a preference to attach ambiguous relative clauses higher in the syntactic structure, as reported by Swets et al. (2007), and contrary to a recency strategy. We also observed that proficiency in L1 and L2 have little effect, suggesting that relative clause attachment preferences primarily reflect the properties of the language and the working memory capacity of the comprehender.

On the Impact of Mode of Presentation and Age on Parsing Structurally Ambiguous Relative Clauses

The relative clause Attachment preferences of female Persian learners of English were investigated regarding their age and modes of presentation (online/offline and holistic/segmented). 50 female native speakers of Persian ranging in age from 15 to 25 participated in the study. The instruments used in the present research included two tests of ambiguous sentences: 1) a grammaticality judgment test, and 2) the main test which was presented in three separate forms: a) Offline, b) online complete presentation (timed) and c) online segment by segment sentence (Self-Paced). This study used the method employed by Kim and Christianson (2013) for determining the attachment preferences of the participants. The results revealed that the participants' age affected the attachment preferences significantly in that adolescents had a clear determiner phrase 1 preference. There was also a statistically significant difference among the three modes of presenting the materials. The findings revealed that learners transferred their attachment strategies from their mother tongue to English, which provided support for transfer hypothesis. The research findings on whether L2 learners can achieve native like patterns of ambiguity resolution is still less than conclusive and findings seem to suggest that L2 learners apply parsing strategies which are less automatized than native speakers and even at odds with some studies reporting no transfer of L1 parsing strategies. Language teachers should make their learners cognizant of relative clause attachment preferences in English to avert their transfer of their mother tongue strategies in determining the antecedents of the relative clauses.

Working Memory Capacity and Relative Clause Attachment Preference of Persian EFL Learners: Does Segmentation Play Any Role?

To contribute to a better understanding of first language (L1) and second language (L2) sentence processing, this study investigated the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and relative clause (RC) attachment preference of Persian learners of English as a foreign language . Additionally, the impact of segmentation of experimental stimuli on the participants' RC attachment preferences was explored. The participants' L1 attachment preference was also measured as baseline. Sixty-two native speakers of Persian participated in offline reading tasks in return for course credit. Results of WM test revealed no correlation between the participants' WMC and both their L1 (Persian) and L2 (English) attachment preferences. Results of the impact of the segmentation of the stimuli, on the other hand, showed when L1 and L2 experimental sentences are displayed with a break between the second determiner phrase (DP2) and the RC, readers prefer to attach the RC more to the first determiner phrase (DP1), especially in L2 (English). This finding provides support for Fodor's (1998) Implicit Prosody Hypothesis. In addition, the study found a positive correlation between L1 and L2 attachment preferences. Also, in order to explore the possible interactions between the variables under investigation, linear mixed effects model was run. Results revealed no interaction between the variables of the study. These findings might justify both interlingual and to some extent intralingual variations in attachment preferences. The findings of the study provide some implications for language teachers with regard to raising L2 learners' awareness for the prosodic aspects of language and the role of L1 transfer in L2 sentence processing.

Recency preference in ambiguous relative clause attachment in Turkish

In Turkish, Relative Clause (RC) attachment ambiguity arises when two noun phrases (NPs) in a genitive construction follow the (RC). The present paper studies Turkish RC attachment preferences of Turkish native speakers in two experiments through off-line comprehension tasks. While in the first experiment the main verb immediately follows the NP group, in the second experiment a group of adjuncts intervened between the second NP and the main verb. The aim of this setting was to observe the effect of Recency and Predicate Proximity in attachment preferences. The results of the first experiment showed a clear preference for low attachment (NP1). This preference was considered to be the result of Recency effect. The outcomes of the second experiment also showed a higher frequency for low attachment preference, but with an increasing rate for high attachment in comparison to the first experiment. This outcome showed first, the effect of Recency was still prevalent, and second, Predicate Proximity along with Relativized Relevance Principle may also have an increasing effect when there is an intervening group of adjuncts between the NP group and the main verb.

Transfer of L1 processing strategies to the interpretation of sentence-level L2 input: A cross-linguistic comparison on the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities

The present study aims to investigate the role of L1 transfer effects on L2 sentence processing strategies during the interpretation of relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguities. The main body of the study is divided into two sections. The first section describes Experiment 1, which is designed to test the resolution of RC attachment ambiguities by Turkish learners of L2 English both in Turkish and English through the use of an off-line task (i.e., paper-and-pencil comprehension tests) and compare their processing preferences to those of native English speakers. The second section presents Experiment 2, which aims to investigate the real-time processing of the RC attachment ambiguities by the same participant groups employing eye-tracking methodology. The results indicated that L1 Turkish and L1 English RC attachment preferences differed and that Turkish learners of L2 English tended to transfer their Turkish sentence processing pattern to real-time interpretation of the English RC attachment ambiguities.

Cross-Domain Priming From Mathematics to Relative-Clause Attachment: A Visual-World Study in French.

Human language processing must rely on a certain degree of abstraction, as we can produce and understand sentences that we have never produced or heard before. One way to establish syntactic abstraction is by investigating structural priming. Structural priming has been shown to be effective within a cognitive domain, in the present case, the linguistic domain. But does priming also work across different domains? In line with previous experiments, we investigated cross-domain structural priming from mathematical expressions to linguistic structures with respect to relative clause attachment in French (e.g., la fille du professeur qui habitait à Paris/the daughter of the teacher who lived in Paris). Testing priming in French is particularly interesting because it will extend earlier results established for English to a language where the baseline for relative clause attachment preferences is different form English: in English, relative clauses (RCs) tend to be attached to the local noun phrase (low attachment) while in French there is a preference for high attachment of relative clauses to the first noun phrase (NP). Moreover, in contrast to earlier studies, we applied an online-technique (visual world eye-tracking). Our results confirm cross-domain priming from mathematics to linguistic structures in French. Most interestingly, different from less mathematically adept participants, we found that in mathematically skilled participants, the effect emerged very early on (at the beginning of the relative clause in the speech stream) and is also present later (at the end of the relative clause). In line with previous findings, our experiment suggests that mathematics and language share aspects of syntactic structure at a very high-level of abstraction.

Sentence Processing in Spanish as a Heritage Language: A Self‐Paced Reading Study of Relative Clause Attachment

AbstractHeritage Spanish is often influenced by English, and previous research on late Spanish‐English bilinguals suggests that their relative clause attachment preferences in Spanish are affected by English exposure. Nevertheless, recent work with heritage speakers has revealed that early (high‐proficiency) Spanish‐English bilinguals demonstrate a monolingual‐like high‐attachment preference in Spanish. Offline data from this self‐paced reading study showed the same preference for bilinguals of intermediate proficiency in a meaning‐oriented rather than a metalinguistic task. However, unlike in previous research, a group of late bilinguals also showed high‐attachment preference, possibly because of insufficient exposure to English. Online data showed no effects for either bilingual group and a nonsignificant numerical trend toward high attachment for a monolingual group. Thus, even moderately proficient heritage speakers seem to be adept at managing interaction between two language systems, so it appears not to affect their interpretation of relative clauses.

Sentence Complexity and Working Memory Effects in Ambiguity Resolution

Two self-paced reading experiments using a paraphrase decision task paradigm were performed to investigate how sentence complexity contributed to the relative clause (RC) attachment preferences of speakers of different working memory capacities (WMCs). Experiment 1 (English) showed working memory effects on relative clause processing in both offline RC attachment preferences and in online reading time measures, but no effects of syntactic complexity. In Experiment 2 (Korean), syntactic complexity due to greater distance between integrating heads, as measured by the dependency locality theory (Gibson in Cognition 68:1-76, 1998), significantly increased the proportion of attachment to NP1. However, no effects of working memory were found. The difference in results between English and Korean is proposed to be due to head-directionality effects. The results of our study support the conclusion that working memory-based accounts provide a better explanation than previous language-dependent accounts for differences in RC attachment preferences. We propose that previous language dependent-accounts of cross-linguistic differences in RC processing have overlooked the interaction between individual WMC and a language's general structure, which is a central factor in RC attachment.

Children's Processing of Ambiguous Sentences: A Study of Relative Clause Attachment

In this study, we investigate children's and adults' relative clause attachment preferences in sentences such as The student photographed the fan of the actress who was looking happy. Twenty-nine 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children and 37 adult native speakers of English participated both in an auditory questionnaire study and in an online, self-paced listening experiment. Whereas the adult group's attachment preferences were influenced by the type of preposition joining the 2 potential antecedent noun phrases (NPs) (of vs. with), children's online attachment preferences varied depending on their listening span: Children with a relatively high listening span showed a preference for NP1 attachment irrespective of the type of preposition involved, whereas the children with a low span showed a general tendency toward NP2 disambiguation. We argue that (i) when resolving modifier attachment ambiguities during online processing, children primarily rely on structural information and (ii) the observed differences between children and adults, as well as those found between the two span groups, reflect working memory differences rather than differences in the parser.