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Article Dans Une Revue JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE Année : 2019

Seeing events vs. entities: The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses

Résumé

We present the results of three offline questionnaires (one attachment preference study and two acceptability judgments) and two eye-tracking studies in French and English investigating the resolution of the ambiguity between Relative Clause and Pseudo Relative interpretations. This structural and interpretive ambiguity has recently been shown to play a central role in the explanation of apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries in Relative Clause attachment (Grillo & Costa, 2014; Grillo et al., 2015). This literature has argued that Pseudo Relatives are preferred to Relative Clauses because of their structural and interpretive simplicity. This paper adds to this growing body of literature in two ways. First we show that, in contrast to previous find- ings, French speakers prefer to attach Relative Clauses to the most local antecedent once Pseudo Relative availability is controlled for. We then provide a direct test for the Pseudo Relatives pref- erence, showing that Relative Clause disambiguation of strings that are initially compatible with a Pseudo Relative interpretation leads to degraded acceptability and longer fixation durations.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-02445926 , version 1 (31-12-2023)

Identifiants

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Celine Pozniak, Barbara Hemforth, Yair Haendler, Andrea Santi, Nino Grillo. Seeing events vs. entities: The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses. JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE, 2019, pp.128-151. ⟨10.1016/j.jml.2019.04.001⟩. ⟨hal-02445926⟩
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