Abstract
In an eyetracking experiment, participants read sentences that contained a prepositional phrase (PP) that could be attached to one of two preceding verbs. To understand the sentence, readers had to select which verb would serve as the host for the PP. In some of the sentences, the critical verbs and the PPs were part of a subordinate clause in which lexical and syntactic factors were expected to matter, but discourse factors favoring attachment of the material to positions where it would be relevant to the main assertion of the sentence were not expected to matter. In other sentences, the critical material was tested in main clause contexts in which the main assertion principle was predicted to apply. Hierarchical linear modeling showed that online attachment preferences were affected by clause type (main vs. subordinate). Specifically, the preference for a local verb over a distant verb was greater when the critical material appeared within a subordinate clause than when it appeared within a main clause. This pattern of results can be explained by the operation of the relativized relevance or main assertion principle, which in our sentences meant that participants favored attachment of the PP to the first verb over the second.
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This research was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Award 1R01HD048914-01A2 and National Science Foundation Award 0446618 to the first author and by NIH Grants HD18708 and HD 17246 to the University of Massachusetts.
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Traxler, M.J., Frazier, L. The role of pragmatic principles in resolving attachment ambiguities: Evidence from eye movements. Memory & Cognition 36, 314–328 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.2.314
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.2.314