Related Experiment Videos
Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English complex NPs
E Gilboy1, J M Sopena, C Clifton
1Department de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
Cognition
|February 1, 1995
Summary
Readers
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Complex noun phrases (NPs) with relative clauses (RCs) present parsing ambiguities.
- Previous research suggested language-specific parsing strategies, like late closure, might differ between Spanish and English.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate cross-linguistic interpretations of ambiguous complex NPs.
- To test the universality of the late closure parsing principle.
- To explore alternative parsing principles like the construal hypothesis.
Main Methods:
- Three questionnaire studies were conducted.
- Participants interpreted sentences with complex NPs in Spanish and English.
- Linguistic analyses focused on syntactic and semantic factors influencing NP-RC attachment.
Main Results:
- Preferences for N1 versus N2 modification in RCs varied significantly across construction types within both languages.
- Cross-linguistic variation in NP-RC attachment preferences was relatively minor.
- Plausibility did not fully explain the observed attachment preferences.
Conclusions:
- The late closure principle is not a universal parsing strategy.
- Parsing preferences for RCs are influenced by construction-specific syntactic and semantic properties.
- The construal hypothesis offers a more accurate account of phrase attachment in complex NPs.