Decoupling syntactic parsing from visual inspection: The case of relative clause attachment in French
Résumé
Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted in order to further examine French readers' attachment preferences for N1-of-N2-Relative clause (RC) constructions. Experiment 1 manipulated the relative lexical frequency of N1 and N2. Disambiguation was provides by an adjective located within the RC, whose gender agreed either with N1 or N2. First-fixation durations recorded at that point were found to be shorter when gender forced attachment to the lower-frequency noun. The aim of Experiments 2 and 3 was to examine attachment preferences in the case of a short RC (e.g. the relative pronoun followed by an intransitive verb). A general preference for low attachment was found in this case. A tentative explanation, likely to account for both frequency and length effects, is presented, based on the assumption that syntactic parsing can be decoupled from visual inspection in expert reading.