Modifier Attachment in Sentence Parsing: Evidence from Dutch.

PARSING (Grammar); SENTENCES (Grammar); DUTCH language

Current theories of parsing suggest a wide variety of mechanisms by which modifiers, such as relative clauses, may be related to constituents that offer more than one potential attachment site. Some, like the tuning hypothesis, are based on the premise that people's parsing performance is shaped by prior exposure to language. Others (e.g. garden-path theory and construal theory) play down any potential role of past linguistic experience, stressing instead the varying influences of structural characteristics of the sentence in question. The two views encourage differing expectations about cross-linguistic variation in parsing preference. A questionnaire study and two on-line experiments were carried out to investigate attachment preferences in Dutch. The results pose a number of problems for the majority of the existing parsing models and are clearly inconsistent with some of the traditional theories. In contrast, the findings are compatible with models incorporating parsing mechanisms that are tuned by language experience. The results highlight the need for further corpus studies to subject these accounts to more searching scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)