The contribution of prosody to the interpretation of temporary syntactic ambiguity was examined for young and elderly listeners using a sentence-completion task. Temporary syntactic ambiguity refers to cases where it may be temporarily unclear whether a syntactic clause boundary has or has not been reached based on what has been heard in the sentence to that point. Results suggest that both you...

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 ...

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 ...

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 three experiments using a speeded grammaticality judgement task the question was investigated of what role morphological ambiguity plays for syntactic ambiguity resolution. The stimuli were German verb-final clauses which are locally ambiguous between a subject-object and an object-subject reading and where the ambiguity is not caused by phrase-structural differences but by differing case-as...

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...