Using the structural priming paradigm, the present study explores predictions made by the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis by testing whether an implicit prosodic boundary generated from a silently read sentence influences attachment preference for a novel, subsequently read sentence. Results indicate that such priming does occur, although the patterns are highly dependent on individual differences ...

This dissertation considers ambiguity resolution in regard to two issues. First, it investigates factors that lead the human parser to favour some types of interpretations over others when faced with some types of ambiguous input. Second it examines the reanalysis process that takes place when initial biases lead to incorrect interpretations. The first part of the dissertation (Chapter 1) propo...

Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen [MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54] pointed to variations in reading ...

The study discusses the role of prosodic grouping in the Mandarin Relative Clause attachment disambiguation. The grouping effect is explored under the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) from four aspects of sentence processing experiments: default production, contrast production, online processing, as well as offline processing. It is found that (1) the length of RC greatly impacts ambiguity res...

I describe the construction of a corpus for research on relative clause extraposition in German based on the treebank TüBa-D/Z. I also define an annotation scheme for the relations between relative clauses and their antecedents which is added as a second annotation level to the syntactic trees. This additional annotation level allows for a direct representation of the relevant parts of the rela...

In this paper, we study the subjunctive relative clause as a means to understand the relation between (non)veridicality, existence and event actualization. I argue that the subjunctive in the relative clause carries a presupposition of epistemic uncertainty as to the existence of a referent for the modified NP. This uncertainty can only be satisfied in non-veridical contexts, hence the distribu...

A review of the literature on children's use of relative clause constructions reveals many contradictory findings. The suggestion is that some studies fail to take into account the two factors of embeddedness (role of complex noun phrase within the sentence) and focus (role of head noun in the relative clause). The experiment reported here attempted to reconcile the disparate findings and exten...

This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California. Research with monolingual Spanish and English speake...