On the Effects of Commas and Line Breaks in Relative Clause Attachment

This study examines the influence of commas and line breaks on attachment preferences in Spanish preverbal relative clauses with two potential antecedents (e.g., The colleague of the violinist who is a far-right supporter performed with the orchestra yesterday). Previous research in Spanish, which focused on postverbal relative clauses, provided evidence that commas introduce an implicit prosodic boundary that encourages attachment to the higher determiner phrase (DP1, the colleague). Here, we assess the separate and combined effects of commas and line breaks in three offline studies in Spanish. First, we assess attachment preferences of sentences with relative clauses preceded by commas and without commas in the under-researched preverbal position. Then, we test whether line breaks could have the same effect as commas in determining attachment. Our findings suggest that only commas consistently and significantly impact attachment preferences, favoring high attachment, and that visual segmentation through line breaks is not enough to obtain the same effect.