Emotional nouns affect attachment decisions in sentence completion tasks

We report three sentence completion experiments in which we manipulate the emotional dimension of the nouns in a complex noun phrase (NP) that precedes a relative clause (RC), as in the classic ambiguity in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. The aim was to see whether nouns such as orgy or genocide affect the well-established preference of Spanish to adjoin the relative clause high in the tree (to servant instead of actress in the example above). We manipulated the valence and arousal of the lexical entities residing in the NP. Our results indicate that (a) the inclusion of either pleasant or unpleasant words induces changes in the usual NP1 preference found in Spanish; (b) the effects of high-arousal words are especially clear, in that they pull RC adjunction towards the NP where they are located, be it the NP1 or the NP2; and (c) in the context of sentence production, these kinds of words seem intense enough to promote changes in (and even reverse) a solid syntactic bias. We discuss these findings in the light of existing theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution.