Seeing events vs. entities: The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses.

TY - JOUR

T1 - Seeing events vs. entities

T2 - The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses.

AU - Pozniak, Céline

AU - Hemforth, Barbara

AU - Haendler, Yair

AU - Santi, Andrea

AU - Grillo, Nino

N1 - © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.

PY - 2019/8/1

Y1 - 2019/8/1

N2 - We present the results of three offline questionnaires (one attachment preference study and two acceptability judgments) and two eye-tracking studies in French and English, investigating the resolution of the ambiguity between pseudo relative and relative clause interpretations. This structural and interpretive ambiguity has recently been shown to play a central role in the explanation of apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries in relative clause attachment (Grillo & Costa, 2014; Grillo et al., 2015). This literature has argued that pseudo relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their structural and interpretive simplicity. This paper adds to this growing body of literature in two ways. First we show that, in contrast to previous findings, French speakers prefer to attach relative clauses to the most local antecedent once pseudo relative availability is controlled for. We then provide direct support for the pseudo relative preference: grammatically forced disambiguation to a relative clause interpretation leads to degraded acceptability and greater processing cost in a pseudo relative environment than maintaining compatibility with a pseudo relative.

AB - We present the results of three offline questionnaires (one attachment preference study and two acceptability judgments) and two eye-tracking studies in French and English, investigating the resolution of the ambiguity between pseudo relative and relative clause interpretations. This structural and interpretive ambiguity has recently been shown to play a central role in the explanation of apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries in relative clause attachment (Grillo & Costa, 2014; Grillo et al., 2015). This literature has argued that pseudo relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their structural and interpretive simplicity. This paper adds to this growing body of literature in two ways. First we show that, in contrast to previous findings, French speakers prefer to attach relative clauses to the most local antecedent once pseudo relative availability is controlled for. We then provide direct support for the pseudo relative preference: grammatically forced disambiguation to a relative clause interpretation leads to degraded acceptability and greater processing cost in a pseudo relative environment than maintaining compatibility with a pseudo relative.

KW - (Pseudo) Relative clauses

KW - Ambiguity resolution

KW - Attachment preferences

KW - Economy of computation

KW - Locality

KW - Universality of parsing principles

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85065473313&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.jml.2019.04.001

DO - 10.1016/j.jml.2019.04.001

M3 - Article

SN - 0749-596X

VL - 107

SP - 128

EP - 151

JO - Journal of Memory and Language

JF - Journal of Memory and Language

ER -