This study examined whether processing ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) following a complex determiner phrase (DP) by Persian-speaking learners of L2 English with different proficiency and working memory capacities (WMCs) is affected by semantic priming. The semantic relationship studied was one between the subject/verb of the main clause and one of the DPs in the complex D...

This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read...

Over the last decade Inductive Logic Programming systems have been dominated by use of top-down refinement search techniques. In this paper we re-examine the use of bottom-up approaches to the construction of logic programs. In particular, we explore variants of Plotkin’s Relative Least General Generalisation (RLGG) which are based on subsumption relative to a bottom clause. With Plotkin’s RLGG...

In this paper, I propose an implementation of relative clause extraposition in German. The proposal builds on Kiss (in press) who treats relative clause extraposition as an anaphoric process by means of percolation of anchors to which the relative clause is bound. I discuss several sources of spurious ambiguity in Kiss’s original formulation and suggest a two-step percolation of anchors that cr...

We describe an approach for resolving relative clause attachment ambiguities using machine learning techniques and WordNet hierarchies. When the relative clause is preceded by the pattern NP1 Prep NP2, a decision has to be made between local and wide attachment. We train a network to make this decision and conclude that knowledge sources like WordNet have a constructive role to play in making s...

Sentences with temporarily ambiguous reduced relative clauses (e.g., The actress selected by the director believed that...) were preceded by discourse contexts biasing a main clause or a relative clause. Eye movements in the disambiguating region (by the director) revealed that, in the relative clause biasing contexts, ambiguous reduced relatives were no more difficult to process than unambiguo...

In an eye-tracking experiment we investigated the influence of referential context on the attachment of a relative clause to two possible hosts (as in "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony"). The attachment of the relative clause was disambiguated grammatically at the first word after the onset of the ambiguity in order to investigate immediate effects of discourse. Th...

This paper presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuing potential nominal heads. Similar to previous results from the processing of English, Spanish and German, we observed the following non-monotonic preference ordering among the three attachment sites: most local, least local, intermediate. We disc...

The so-called Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) construction found in the head-final languages Korean and Japanese has received little attention from computational perspectives even though it is frequently found in both text and speech. This is partly because there have been no grammars precise enough to allow deep processing of the construction’s syntactic and semantic properties. This ...