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 ambiguity illustrated in (1) should preferentially be resolved in favor of the Late Closure (local-attachment) interpretation. English speakers generally conform to this prediction, preferring an interpretation of the relative clause (RC), who was on the balcony, as a modifier of the second or low noun, actress (N2), despite the fact that the non-local attachment to the first or high noun, servant (N1), is also possible.