Another word on parsing relative clauses Eyetracking evidence from Spanish and English Manuel Carreiras & Charles Clifton, Jr.

Universal Parsing Strategies? Preference for the simplest interpretation Minimal attachment strategy (Frazier, 1979, 1987) Not postulating any unnecessary nodes Late closure Attach new items into clause/phrase currently processing Are these strategies universal? Cuetos & Mitchell (1988) – late closure fails to apply in Spanish to parsing of RCs preceded by complex NPs 1. Someone shot the female servant of the actress who was on the balcony

Universal Parsing Strategies? Preference for the simplest interpretation Minimal attachment strategy (Frazier, 1979, 1987) Not postulating any unnecessary nodes Late closure Attach new items into clause/phrase currently processing Are these strategies universal? Cuetos & Mitchell (1988) – late closure fails to apply in Spanish to parsing of RCs preceded by complex NPs 1.Someone shot the female servant of the actress who was on the balcony

Universal Parsing Strategies? Preference for the simplest interpretation Minimal attachment strategy (Frazier, 1979, 1987) Not postulating any unnecessary nodes Late closure Attach new items into clause/phrase currently processing Are these strategies universal? Cuetos & Mitchell (1988) – late closure fails to apply in Spanish to parsing of RCs preceded by complex NPs 1.Someone shot the female servant of the actress who was on the balcony

Universal Parsing Strategies? Preference for the simplest interpretation Minimal attachment strategy (Frazier, 1979, 1987) Not postulating any unnecessary nodes Late closure Attach new items into clause/phrase currently processing Are these strategies universal? Cuetos & Mitchell (1988) – late closure fails to apply in Spanish to parsing of RCs preceded by complex NPs 1.Someone shot the female servant of the actress who was on the balcony 2.Alguien disparó contra la criada de la actriz que estaba en el balcón

Universal Parsing Strategies? Preference for the simplest interpretation Minimal attachment strategy (Frazier, 1979, 1987) Not postulating any unnecessary nodes Late closure Attach new items into clause/phrase currently processing Are these strategies universal? Cuetos & Mitchell (1988) – late closure fails to apply in Spanish to parsing of RCs preceded by complex NPs 1.Someone shot the female servant of the actress who was on the balcony 2.Alguien disparó contra la criada de la actriz que estaba en el balcón

Universal Parsing Strategies? Preference for the simplest interpretation Minimal attachment strategy (Frazier, 1979, 1987) Not postulating any unnecessary nodes Late closure Attach new items into clause/phrase currently processing Are these strategies universal? Cuetos & Mitchell (1988) – late closure fails to apply in Spanish to parsing of RCs preceded by complex NPs 1.Someone shot the female servant of the actress who was on the balcony 2.Alguien disparó contra la criada de la actriz que estaba en el balcón

Universal Parsing Strategies? Differences across other languages? In Spanish, French, German, and Dutch, the head of the complex NP (N1) is preferred as the subject of the RC See Carreiras & Clifton (1999), p. 827 for complete list Italian readers initially prefer N2 as the agent DeVincenzi & Job, 1993, 1995 As other studies have shown, English readers either prefer N2 as the agent of the RC or show no preference Carreiras & Clifton, 1993; Henstra, 1996

Universal Parsing Strategies? An experimental artifact? Gilboy & Sopena (1996) - Segmentation Obtained preference for high attachment of N1 to RC only with large segmentation La policía arrestó a la hermana del criado/que dio a luz recientemente a dos gemelos The police arrested the sister of the handyman/who recently gave birth to twins No effects were found for small segmentation (splitting RC into two displays) La policía arrestó/a la hermana/del criado/que dio a luz recientemente a dos gemelos The police arrested/the sister/of the handyman/who recently gave birth to twins Conclusion: N1 preferences only arise when a particular segmentation (large) allows for characteristics of prosodic patterns to appear

Purpose Two-fold: 1. Whether N1 preference in Spanish is a byproduct of segmentation or an underlying property of the language 2. Whether native English and native Spanish readers resolve ambiguity of attachment of RCs preceded by NPs in different ways for the same sentences Examined performances for ambiguous structures of the type: N1 of N2 RC Three eye-movement studies: 1. Experiments 1&2: conducted in Spanish 2. Experiment 3: conducted in English

Experiment 1 Subjects 44 undergraduate students Apparatus Sentences were presented in lowercase letters on a monitor which displayed up to 80 characters per line Eye movements were monitored by a Dual Purkinje Eyetracker

Experiment 1 Design 16 sentences (English/Spanish) which contained a complex NP (N1 de N2) followed by an RC intermixed with 144 other filler sentences RC attachment was disambiguated by gender information

Experiment 1 Results (First-Pass Times) No significant effects for: 1.First-pass times at CR Those disambiguated toward high attachment were numerically faster 2.Masculine and feminine hosts 3.Interaction between type of host and type of disambiguation

Experiment 1 Results (Total time) Ss read CRs more rapidly when disambiguating toward high attachment (N1) Sentences requiring feminine hosts for disambiguation were read faster than those with masculine hosts Conclusion: high attachment preferences are REAL

Experiment 2 Purpose High attachment was numerically present only when disambiguating part of the RC required a masculine antecedent May be that more masculine than feminine RCs contained disambiguating morphology Wanted to examine different sentences, all of which were disambiguated morphologically by gender

Experiment 2 Results (First-pass) No significant effects for: Type of disambiguation closure Type of host Interaction between disambiguation and host Results (Total time) Regions disambiguating toward high attachment (N1) were read faster than those toward low attachment (N2) Conclusion: effect not restricted to a particular gender

Experiment 3 Purpose Determine whether English readers have a bias to interpret an RC as modifying the most recent noun (N2) Method Subjects: 36 undergraduate students Same apparatus and design as Experiment 1

Experiment 3 Results (First-Pass) Ss read the CR faster when disambiguated toward low attachment (N2) No significant effects for type of host or interaction Results (Total Time) Low attachment disambiguations (N2) were read faster than high attachment ones (N1)

Conclusions Spanish readers have a modest preference for interpreting an RC as modifying NP1 and is not a consequence of segmentation American English readers show a preference for low attachment of an RC to N2, although this result has not always been found

Implications Why do the 2 languages differ? 1. Spanish does not violate closure (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988) Low attachment is an expression of a universal processing principle, such as late closure, which is overridden by certain constructions of other languages 2. Tuning hypothesis (Mitchell & Cuetos, 1991) Initial resolution of structural ambiguities is determined by the frequency with which alternative disambiguations are encountered 3. Predicate-proximity/Recency (Gibson, et al., 1996) Initial preferences are guided by weights of parameters, that may differ among languages: Predicate proximity (attach to head of predicate) Recency (attach to most recent site)

Implications Why do the 2 languages differ? 1. Existence of the Saxon genitive (‘s) Limits late closure to primary phrases (e.g. the colonel’s daughter who was on the porch) If a speaker wanted to express high attachment, he or she would use the ‘s form 2. Pronoun interpretation (Hemforth, Konieczny, & Scheepers) RCs are associate in languages such as German by default with the most salient available host (generally N1, the head of the complex NP and argument of main predicate) In English, the word that is often used to introduce RCs, causing RCs to be treated less like pronouns and more like complement phrases (obeying late closure)

Implications Why do the 2 languages differ? 1. Heavy RCs RCs are generally heavy, and prefer a relatively large host phrase High attachment makes the N1 of N2 phrase the host (closer in size to typical RC than just N2 alone) In English, because the word that is often phonologically reduced, it is absorbed into the preceding prosodic phrase Thus, N2 is relatively heavier and the RC is correspondingly less heavy, encouraging their attachment