Early and late preferences in relative clause attachment in Portuguese and Spanish

Relative clause attachment ambiguity resolution in Persian

The present study seeks to find the way Persian native speakers resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences containing a complex NP of the type NP of NP followed by a relative clause (RC). Previous off-line studies have found a preference for high attachment in the present study, an on-line technique was used to help identify the nature of this process. Persian speakers were pre...

Relative clause attachment preferences in second language learners' parsing performance

Relative Clause Attachment in Bulgarian

Over the past 25 years of sentence processing research, hardly any other phenomenon has generated more experimental evidence and theoretical explanations than the apparent violations of Late Closure (Frazier and Fodor 1978) observed with the relative clause attachment ambiguity. Under the Late Closure principle, local attachments are preferred over non-local ones. Accordingly, the structural am...

Contextual Effects and Locality Preferences in Relative Clause Attachment in Thai

Since the early 1990s, there has been a debate on the universality of locality in sentence processing (i.e., the preference to associate a word or phrase to the closest possible word). Studies across various languages have investigated ambiguous relative clauses that can be attached to either of two nouns to determine the types of languages in which locality is violated. We report a corpus coun...

Relative clause processing in Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese

This dissertation considers ambiguity resolution in regard to two issues. First, it investigates factors that lead the human parser to favour some types of interpretations over others when faced with some types of ambiguous input. Second it examines the reanalysis process that takes place when initial biases lead to incorrect interpretations. The first part of the dissertation (Chapter 1) propo...