<p>Relative clause attachment in Dutch: On-line comprehension corresponds to corpus frequencies when lexical variables are taken into account</p>

Authors: Desmet, Timothy¹; De Baecke, Constantijn¹; Drieghe, Denis¹; Brysbaert, Marc²; Vonk, Wietske³

Source: Language and Cognitive Processes, Volume 21, Number 4, June 2006 , pp. 453-485(33)

Publisher: Psychology Press, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

<p>Desmet, Brysbaert, and De Baecke (2002a) showed that the production of relative clauses following two potential attachment hosts (e.g., â-˜Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balconyâ-™) was influenced by the animacy of the first host. These results were important because they refuted evidence from Dutch against experience-based accounts of syntactic ambiguity resolution, such as the tuning hypothesis. However, Desmet et al. did not provide direct evidence in favour of tuning, because their study focused on production and did not include reading experiments. In the present paper this line of research was extended. A corpus analysis and an eye-tracking experiment revealed that when taking into account lexical properties of the NP host sites (i.e., animacy and concreteness) the frequency pattern and the on-line comprehension of the relative clause attachment ambiguity do correspond. The implications for exposure-based accounts of sentence processing are discussed.</p>

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01690960400023485

Affiliations: 1: Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium 2: Royal Holloway, University of London, UK 3: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Publication date: 2006-06-01

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