Modifier Attachment in DutchDutch: Testing Aspects of Construal Theory

Eye-movement recording as a tool for studying syntactic processing in a second language: a review of methodologies and experimental findings

“…Given the number of factors that affect its resolution, no single model can account for how this ambiguity is resolved (for different proposals, see Cuetos et al, 1996;Frazier and Clifton, 1996;Gibson et al, 1996;Mitchell et al, 2000). Of interest for the present purposes is how nonnative readers treat this ambiguity.…”

“…The preposition also plays a major role, with almost universal 'N2' or 'low' attachment of the relative preferred, both on and off-line, when the preposition has semantic content, as in 11 (De Vincenzi and Job, 1995;Gilboy et al, 1995;Frenck-Mestre and Pynte, 2000b), while wide cross-linguistic variation is observed when the preposition is devoid of semantic content, as in example (10) (for a review, see Mitchell et al, 2000). Given the number of factors that affect its resolution, no single model can account for how this ambiguity is resolved (for different proposals, see Cuetos et al, 1996;Frazier and Clifton, 1996;Gibson et al, 1996;Mitchell et al, 2000).…”

“…• how the sentence is segmented (due assumedly to the effect of segmentation on prosody; see Gilboy and Sopena, 1996, as well as Fodor, 1998;Carreiras and Clifton, 1999); • training on a given structure (Frenck-Mestre and Pynte, 2000a); and • whether one considers off-line measures such as questionnaire or corpus data as opposed to on-line measures of reading (De Vincenzi and Job, 1995;Mitchell et al, 2000).…”

The influence of referential discourse context on modifier attachment in Dutch

“…However, Spanish speakers showed a preference for high attachment (i.e., to "the servant"), in contrast with the predictionsof Frazier's theory. Subsequent research has confirmed the Spanish NP1-attachment bias for most non-English languages (for reviews, see Mitchell & Brysbaert, 1998;Mitchell, Brysbaert, Grondelaers, & Swanepoel, 2000; see also Carreiras & Clifton, 1999). Zagar, Pynte, and Rativeau (1997) looked at the influence of referential context on this type of syntactic ambiguity.…”

Relative clause attachment in Dutch: On-line comprehension corresponds to corpus frequencies when lexical variables are taken into account

“…Whereas in the corpus there were more sentences with middle attachments (to 'a baby') than with high attachments (to 'a customer'), in reading tasks participants had less processing problems with high attachments than with middle attachments. In the second study, Mitchell and Brysbaert (1998) analysed a corpus of Dutch newspaper and magazine articles for sentences like (1), and observed that low-attaching relative clauses were twice as frequent as high-attaching relative clauses, despite the finding that in reading studies Dutch-speaking participants consistently preferred high attachment (e.g., Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Desmet, De Baecke, & Brysbaert, 2002b;Mitchell, Brysbaert, Grondelaers, & Swanepoel, 2000).…”