Locality and attachment preferences in preverbal versus post-verbal Relative Clauses. Issue 10 (26th November 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Aguilar, Miriam; Ferré, Pilar; Hinojosa, José A.; Gavilán, José M.; Demestre, Josep
• Is Part Of: Language, cognition and neuroscience. Volume 37:Issue 10(2022)
• Page Start: 1303
• Page End: 1310
• Publication Date: 2022-11-26
• Subjects: Eye-tracking -- syntactic ambiguities -- parsing principles -- locality -- relative Clauses; Psycholinguistics -- Periodicals; Linguistics -- Periodicals; Neurosciences -- Periodicals; Psycholinguïstiek; Cognitieve processen; Linguistics; Neurosciences; Psycholinguistics; Periodicals; 401.9
• DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2022.2066701
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2327-3798

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The universality of locality is a long-standing debate that has endured in psycholinguistics in spite of the challenges. The non-local preference of attachment in Relative Clauses (RCs) with double antecedent (DP1-of-DP2-RC) reported in a subset of languages (i.e. Spanish) represented an important challenge that locality-based accounts had to address. The forces responsible for attachment preferences turned out to be multifactorial, with relevant roles for prosody, referentiality, lexical semantics and Pseudo-Relative availability. In the present eye-tracking study, we explore the timing of disambiguation in Spanish DP1-of-DP2-RC structures placed in preverbal and post-verbal positions, while also controlling for the previously mentioned influencing factors. Our results are straightforward: an early processing cost arises when the RC is disambiguated non-locally, irrespective of the position. The implications of this work contribute to a better understanding of parsing processes and suggest that locality is at the centre of the forces that influence RC attachment.