The Role of Lexical and Contextual Information in Parsing Ambiguous Sentences in Greek

This study reports results from a sentence completion task and a self-paced reading experiment examining relative clause (RC) attachment preferences in native speakers of Greek. To determine the role of lexical-semantic as well as referential context information for RC attachment, we examined two constructions under different context conditions: RCs preceded by complex noun phrases with genitives [DP-1+DP-2Gen] and RCs preceded by complex noun phrases containing prepositional phrases [DP-1+PP[P DP-2]. We found different attachment preferences for these two constructions, a high (DP-1) preference for RCs with genitive antecedents and a low (DP-2) preference for PP antecedents. We also found that in the on-line task, even a strongly biased referential context had only a limited effect on these attachment preferences; in particular, context information does not override or reverse these preferences in the self-paced reading experiment. These results suggest that in on-line ambiguity resolution, adult native speakers mainly rely on phrase-structure and lexical information, and to a lesser extent on discourse-level information. Parsing ambiguous sentences in Greek 3