The influence of referential discourse context on modifier attachment in Dutch

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Syntactic ambiguity resolution is a key area in psycholinguistics.
• The role of referential context in resolving syntactic ambiguity, specifically relative clause attachment, remains debated.
• Previous research suggests context influences processing, but immediate effects are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the immediate influence of referential context on relative clause attachment preferences.
• To determine if discourse context biases early or late closure during real-time sentence processing.
• To test theories on the interaction between context and syntactic ambiguity resolution.

Main Methods:

• An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure reading times and fixation patterns.
• Participants read sentences containing a syntactically ambiguous relative clause.
• Referential contexts were manipulated to induce strong biases for either early or late closure, pre-verified in a sentence completion study.

Main Results:

• No significant interaction was found between referential context and relative clause attachment preference.
• A consistent and robust preference for early closure was observed across all conditions.
• The effect of early closure preference was independent of the preceding discourse context.

Conclusions:

• Referential context does not appear to influence the initial attachment decision of relative clauses.
• The preference for early closure is a dominant factor in immediate syntactic ambiguity resolution.
• Context may play a role in later stages of sentence processing, such as reanalysis or interpretation, rather than initial attachment.