the present study attempts to investigate parsing preferences (early vs. late closure) of native and l2 learners of both english and persian when they read ambiguous relative clauses. the purpose is to find out if l2 learners process l2 linguistic input in the way monolingual speakers of that language do. the participants took tests including 10 test sentences plus 10 distractors, each followed...

The paper claims that the right attachment rules for phrases originally suggested by Frazier and Fodor are wrong, and that none of the subsequent patchings of the rules by syntactic methods have improved the situation. For each rule there are perfectly straightforward and indefinitely large classes of simple counterexamples. We then examine suggestions by Ford et M., Schubert and Hirst which ar...

The paper claims that the right attachment rules for phrases originally suggested by Frazier and Fodor are wrong, and that none of the subsequent patchings of the rules by syntactic methods have improved the situation. For each rule there are perfectly straightforward and indefinitely large classes of simple counterexamples. We then examine suggestions by Ford et a!., Schubert and Hirst which a...

Objective: To determine the influence of adult attachment orientations on infant preference. Methods: We adopted eye-tracking technology to monitor childless college women's eye movements when looking at pairs of faces, including one adult face (man or woman) and one infant face, with three different expressions (happy, sadness, and neutral). The participants (N = 150; 84% Han ethnicity) were a...

One experiment provided evidence in support of Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, and Hickok's (1996) claim that a recency preference applies to Spanish relative clause attachments, contrary to the claim made by Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). Spanish speakers read stimuli involving either two or three potential attachment sites in which the same lexical content of the two-site conditions appea...

This paper investigates the strength of the local attachment preference in syntactic ambiguity resolution, based on a study of a novel ambiguity for which the predictions of local attachment contrast with the predictions of a wide range of other ambiguity resolution principles. In sentences of the form “Because Rose praised the recipe I made...” we show that the ambiguous clause “I made“ is pre...

We show that comprehenders' expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced rea...