The influence of referential discourse context on modifier attachment in Dutch

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

“…The main purpose of this experiment was to find out whether the contradiction between the reading data in Dutch (Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Desmet et al, 2002b;Mitchell et al, 2000;Wijnen, 1998) and the corpus findings reported by Mitchell and Brysbaert (1998) was indeed due to the animacy of the nouns as suggested by Desmet et al (2002a). In addition, we wanted to know whether there was a distinction between concrete and abstract animate nouns as suggested by Table 3.…”

“…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).…”

“…than NP2 attachments. Interestingly, the items used in the Dutch reading studies (Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Desmet et al, 2002b;Mitchell et al, 2000;Wijnen, 1998) mainly consisted of the last two types of sentences (1 and 2). This means that the animacy of NP1 could be responsible for the divergence between sentence writing and sentence reading.…”

Referential context effects in L2 ambiguity resolution: Evidence from self-paced reading

“…The results from eye-movement monitoring experiments investigating relative clause attachment ambiguities in French (Zagar et al, 1997) and Dutch (Desmet et al, 2002) also showed no evidence that participants' initial attachment decisions were influenced by referential information.…”

Accounting for regressive eye-movements in models of sentence processing: A reappraisal of the Selective Reanalysis hypothesis

“…For example, regression rates have been shown to increase in the disambiguation regions of sentences (e.g., Frazier & Rayner, 1982;Meseguer, Carreiras, & Clifton, 2002;Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983;Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993;van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2001). Partly as a consequence of this, regression-based measures of reading time also increase in such regions (e.g., Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Desmet, De Baecke, & Brysbaert, 2002;van Gompel et al, 2001). Given the pervasiveness of these phenomena, it would be reasonable to expect detailed explanations of regressive eye-movements to feature prominently in the development and evaluation of implemented models of sentence processing.…”