This article examines how certain types of semantic and discourse context affect the processing of relative clauses which are temporarily ambiguous between a relative clause and a main clause (e.g., "The actress selected by the director ..."). We review recent results investigating local semantic context and temporal context, and we present some new data investigating referential contexts. The ...

Over the past 25 years of sentence processing research, hardly any other phenomenon has generated more experimental evidence and theoretical explanations than the apparent violations of Late Closure (Frazier and Fodor 1978) observed with the relative clause attachment ambiguity. Under the Late Closure principle, local attachments are preferred over non-local ones. Accordingly, the structural am...

Parsing strategies in temporarily ambiguous sentences were investigated in readers with different sentence memory capacities using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Readers with a high memory span as well as readers with a low memory span were required to read subject and object relative sentences which were either ambiguous until the last word (late disambiguation) or were disambiguated b...

This paper presents the results of a sentence completion study and a self-paced reading experiment involving a relative clause attachment ambiguity. Our results provide evidence that comprehenders resolve local structural ambiguity during incremental sentence processing by combining expectations about upcoming discourse continuations with their knowledge of typical relationships between event p...

Sentences containing relative clauses are well known to be difficult to comprehend, and they have long been an arena in which to investigate the role of working memory in language comprehension. However, recent work has suggested that relative clause processing is better described by ambiguity resolution processes than by limits on extrinsic working memory. We investigated these alternative vie...

This paper investigates the strength of the local attachment preference in syntactic ambiguity resolution, based on a study of a novel ambiguity for which the predictions of local attachment contrast with the predictions of a wide range of other ambiguity resolution principles. In sentences of the form “Because Rose praised the recipe I made...” we show that the ambiguous clause “I made“ is pre...

This paper investigates the extent to which existing structural commitments constrain the human parser’s search for analyses of new incoming material, specifically whether a Reanalysis as a Last Resort (RALR) strategy applies to sentence parsing. Two self-paced reading experiments investigated this issue using a structural ambiguity in which a local, easy reanalysis parse is pitted against a no...

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 article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...

This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive...