Contextual Effects and Locality Preferences in Relative Clause Attachment in Thai
نویسندگان
چکیده
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 count and a questionnaire in Thai indicating that intra-sentential contexts can obscure locality. Two reading experiments controlling for context are also reported in support of locality in Thai. The finding that context distorted locality raises the possibility that previous reports of locality violations in various languages may be reduced to contextual effects.
منابع مشابه
Semantic Priming Effect on Relative Clause Attachment Ambiguity Resolution in L2
This study examined whether processing ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) following a complex determiner phrase (DP) by Persian-speaking learners of L2 English with different proficiency and working memory capacities (WMCs) is affected by semantic priming. The semantic relationship studied was one between the subject/verb of the main clause and one of the DPs in the complex D...
متن کاملRelative Clause Ambiguity Resolution in L1 and L2: Are Processing Strategies Transferred?
This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read...
متن کاملRelative 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...
متن کاملRecency in verb phrase attachment.
Four experiments investigated attachment preferences in constructions involving 3 verb phrases (VPs) followed by an attaching modifier. Readers preferred attachment to the most recent (lowest) VP site overall and preferred to attach the modifier to the middle VP over the highest VP, demonstrating a monotonic recency-based preference ordering. This pattern could not be attributed to lexical or p...
متن کاملThe implicit prosody of Jabberwocky and the relative clause attachment riddle
This contribution reports on three sentence processing experiments involving structurally ambiguous Jabberwocky strings. The items are complex NPs, in which a relative clause can be attached to either of two nominal heads (NP1-preposition-NP2-RC). The phonological lengths of the heads, as well as that of the relative clause, are manipulated. The results show modest effects on relative clause at...
متن کامل