Recency and lexical preferences in Spanish

Abstract

One experiment provided evidence in support of Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, and Hickok's (1996) claim that a recency preference applies to Spanish relative clause attachments, contrary to the claim made by Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). Spanish speakers read stimuli involving either two or three potential attachment sites in which the same lexical content of the two-site conditions appeared in a different structural configuration in the three-site conditions. High attachment was easier than low attachment when only two sites were present, but low attachment was preferred over high attachment, which was in turn preferred over middle attachment, when three sites were present. The experiment replicated earlier results and showed that (1) attachment preferences are determined in part by a preference to attach recently/low, and (2) lexical biases are insufficient to explain attachment preferences.Recent debate about the properties of the human sentence processor has focused both on the purported universality, or cross-linguistic applicability, ofvarious parsing principles (e.g., Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988; Frazier, 1987a Frazier, , 1987bMitchell & Cuetos, 1991;Schriefers, Friederici, & Kuhn, 1995) and on the degree to which such principles might be replaced by lexically and contextually determined preferences (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995; MacDonald, Pearl mutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994). Although some of the proposals that are intended to account for evidence about lexical and contextual effects also have implications for universality issues (e.g., Tabor, Juliano, & Tanenhaus, 1997; cf. Frazier, 1995), the majority of the work examining one issue has not directly examined the other (cf. Schriefers et al., 1995).The experiments reported in this paper were conducted while V'I. was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research was supported by NIH Fellowship MHI0592 to N.1.P. We greatly appreciate the comments and advice of Chuck Clifton, Don Mitchell, Michael Spivey-Knowlton, and one anonymous reviewer. We also thank Karlos Arregui-Urbina for helping us to conduct the norming survey; and Nereida Diaz, Patricia Pimentel, and San Tunstall for aid in running participants and in analyzing data. Portions ofthis work were presented at the 1996 meeting ofthe Psychonomic Society (Chicago) and at the 1997 CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (Santa Monica, CA). Correspondence should be addressed to E. Gibson, NE20-459, Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, Cambridge, MA 02 I39 (e-mail: gibson@psyche. mit.edu) or to N. 1. Pearlmutter, Psychology Department 125 NI, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 021 15 (pearimutter@neu.edu).One proposed universal parsing principle that has received recent attention with respect to the universality issue is Frazier's (1978Frazier's ( , 1987a late closure principle (see also Kimball's, 1973, right association and Gibson's, 1991, ...

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

“…Results from Gibson, Pearlmutter, and Torrens' (1999) study of three-site ambiguities in Spanish provide further support for the Recency-Predicate-Proximity interaction. Gibson et al (1996) argued that the relative strength of the Predicate Proximity principle is variable, which makes it possible for it to outrank Recency in some languages or in situations where computational resources are short.…”

“…In addition, there is evidence from both offline and online studies that semantic properties of the linking preposition affect adult speakers' attachment decisions in two-site contexts. The findings from Gibson et al's (1996) and Gibson, Pearlmutter, and Torrens' (1999) studies indicate, however, that these "preposition effects," or lexical biases, can be overridden if the complexity of the overall NP is increased.…”

The syntactic complexity of Russian relative clauses

“…Although no single theory yet explains why we see precisely the memory-based and expectation-based patterns in the circumstances we do, expanding the scope of inquiry across languages raises prospects for clarifying this picture and thereby advancing our fundamental understanding of online language comprehension. In cases of ambiguity resolution, our understanding has already benefited considerably from a broader cross-linguistic view (Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996; Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988; Cuetos, Mitchell, & Corley, 1996; Desmet, Brysbaert, & de Baecke, 2002; Gibson, Schütze, & Salomon, 1996; Gibson, Pearlmutter, & Torrens, 1999; Mitchell & Brysbaert, 1998). With the present studies we hope to contribute to similar advances in our understanding of syntactic complexity.…”

Cross-linguistic priming of syntactic hierarchical configuration information

“…In the present study, we investigated a much studied syntactic ambiguity, namely the attachment of a relative clause to two possible noun phrases (e.g., Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988;Desmet et al, in press;De Vincenzi & Job, 1995;Fodor, 1998;Gilboy et al, 1995;Hemforth et al, 2000;Mitchell, Cuetos, Corley, & Brysbaert, 1995;Scheepers, 2003;Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998; and see Desmet & Gibson, 2003;Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, & Hickok, 1996;Gibson, Pearlmutter, & Torrens, 1999;Gibson & Schü tze, 1999;Igoa, Carreiras, & Meseguer, 1998, for similar attachment ambiguities). In Experiment 1, it was shown that native Dutch speakers were more likely to produce a relative clause that attached to the higher noun phrase in the syntactic tree configuration when they had been induced to produce a high-attachment relative clause in the previous item compared to when they had been induced to produce a low-attachment relative clause in the previous item.…”