land, E-ma (RALR) strategy applies to sentence parsing. Two self-paced reading experiments investigate this issue using a structural ambiguity in which a local, easy reanalysis is pitted against a nonlocal attachment requiring no reanalysis. This ambiguity is created by embedding classic noun phrase/sentential complement ambiguities inside a relative clause modifying a subject NP. The results o...

This study aims to present an accessible model of some frequent nonfinite adverbial types occurring in English prose fiction. As its main syntactic argument, it recognizes that these adverbials are mostly elliptical in that there are some dependent-clause markers one can assume to be implicit when supplying those elements back into the clause complex. Some comments are provided at the end on th...

We examined the production of relative clauses in sentences with a complex noun phrase containing two possible attachment sites for the relative clause (e.g., "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony."). On the basis of two corpus analyses and two sentence continuation tasks, we conclude that much research about this specific syntactic ambiguity has used complex noun phra...

An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The amb...

The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Abstract This paper presents a self-paced reading experiment comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in supportive contexts in Chinese. It is argued that lack of a consistent pattern in the literature fo...

In two self-paced reading experiments, subject relative clauses (e.g., 'the woman who saw the man') were read faster than object relative clauses ('the woman who the man saw') in Japanese. Previous formulations of working-memory factors do not predict the patterns observed. A preference to complete fragments as object relative clauses indicates that ambiguity and expectation are unlikely to exp...

A computer grammar is described which includes most of the English relative-clause constructions. It is written in the form of a left-to-right phrase-structure grammar with discontinuous constituents and subscripts, which carry such syntactic restrictions as number and verb government category. The motivation for the hierarchy of syntactic choices and for the use of discontinuous constituents i...