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Related Experiment Videos

Recency in verb phrase attachment.

N J Pearlmutter1, E Gibson

  • 1Psychology Department, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. pearlmutter@neu.edu

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|April 11, 2001
PubMed
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Readers consistently prefer attaching modifiers to the most recent verb phrase (VP) in complex sentences. This recency-based preference in sentence processing is a key finding for understanding language comprehension.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Syntactic ambiguity resolution is crucial for language comprehension.
  • Previous research shows varied attachment preferences for different grammatical constructions.
  • Understanding factors influencing attachment preferences informs theories of sentence processing.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate attachment preferences in sentences with three verb phrases (VPs) and an attaching modifier.
  • To determine if preferences follow a monotonic or nonmonotonic pattern.
  • To test the predictions of the multiple-constraint theory.

Main Methods:

  • Four experiments were conducted using sentence constructions with three verb phrases (VPs).
  • Participants' preferences for attaching a modifier to different VP sites were recorded.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Lexical, plausibility, and prosodic factors were controlled or analyzed.

    • Main Results:

    • A monotonic recency-based preference ordering was observed, with attachment to the lowest VP site being most preferred.
    • Attachment to the middle VP was preferred over the highest VP.
    • Lexical or plausibility-based preferences did not account for the observed pattern.

    Conclusions:

    • Recency/locality is a dominant factor in resolving attachment ambiguity in this VP construction.
    • The findings support the multiple-constraint theory, highlighting the interplay of recency and predicate proximity.
    • Attachment preferences in VP constructions differ from those observed in relative clause attachments.