Spanish is <i>not</i> different: On the universality of minimal structure and locality principles

A sensible assumption in psycholinguistics is that universal principles of optimal computation guide structural decisions made during sentence processing. This idea was questioned by the apparent cross-linguistic variation Relative Clause attachment: a wealth experimental results from nineties showed speakers Spanish, among other languages, more readily converged towards least resolution (i.e. non-local attachment) challenging universality parsing locality. recent development this literature demonstrated previous were confounded availability an additional parse, so-called Pseudo-Relative, ill-behaved languages (Grillo 2012; Grillo & Costa 2014). and colleagues further suggested parser disambiguates favour Pseudo-Relative reading, when possible, because its interpretive simplicity comparison to Clauses attachment direct consequence independent preference. We present novel support account two offline forced-choice questionnaires Spanish. The show significantly affects preferences likely be epiphenomenal largely attributable underlying grammatical differences.