ERP signatures of attachment height variations in English and Spanish
Date
2016
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Previous research suggests that the processing of ambiguous relative clauses and prepositional phrases is language-specific. For instance, when a relative clause can be attached to several nodes in a tree (e.g. in 'the maid of the bride who was on the balcony', the relative clause 'who was on the balcony' can be attached to 'the maid' or ' the bride'), English speakers prefer the low node (i.e. ' the bride who was on the balcony'), while Spanish speakers prefer the high node (i.e. 'the maid who was on the balcony ') (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). -- The current thesis aimed to scrutinize the previously claimed asymmetries in the processing of English and Spanish sentences by looking at the detailed time course of parsing. Attachment height variations will be tested by using sentences with relative clauses and prepositional phrases that can have two possible attachment sites (i.e. high and low). -- Posterior Negativity effects were found in both high and low conditions in both English and Spanish. Similar effects were found in experiments with relative clause and prepositional phrases. In a cross-language comparison, no significant effects for language were found. -- Our contribution to knowledge was twofold. Firstly, it was found that the parser is sensitive to the ungrammaticality and semantic implausibility triggered by both high and low attachments regardless of the language, which means that no attachment site is preferred and that parallel parsing occurs. Secondly, native speakers of English and Spanish showed very similar responses to the stimuli, suggesting that the parsing process for these structures in both languages is alike. -- These findings could serve as evidence to support parallel parsing models and Construal, which claim that adjunct phrases receive an initial multiple analysis that undergoes disambiguation at later stages (McRoy & Hirst, 1990; Frazier & Clifton, 1996). Moreover, observing similar responses in both English and Spanish at early stages of the parsing processing indicates that the asymmetries observed in attachment height preferences between the two languages in previous studies (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1989; Fernandez, 2002) could be due to post-syntactic factors, such as prosody, which come into play at late parsing stages.