Naslov
The influence of structural-semantic factors on parsing strategies and attachment preferences in Croatian

Autori
Matić, Ana

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
6th Young Linguists' Meeting in Poznań: Book of Abstracts / - , 2018, 62-63

Skup
Young Linguists' Meeting in Poznań

Mjesto i datum
Poznań, Poljska, 23.11.2018. - 25.11.2018

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Poster

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
Parsing ; Construal ; Attachment Preferences ; Croatian

Sažetak
Parsing refers to the incremental processes involved in constructing syntactic structures during language comprehension (Van Gompel & Pickering, 2007). It remains debatable what predominately drives the parser and affects parsing strategies (Papadopoulou, 2006). After revolutionary findings on attachment preferences in Spanish relative clauses (RCs) that challenged the universality of the late closure principal (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988), numerous studies have shown that there were some linguistic, as well as nonlinguistic/intra-individual factors (WM capacity) that influenced processing RCs. Following these findings, new theoretical approaches and models appeared. Some of them focus simply on reanalysis in parsing (Unrestricted race ; Van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2000), some on the influence of previous linguistic experience on parsing (Tuning ; Mitchell Cuetos, Corley, & Brysbaert, 1995), some on prosodic aspects (Implicit prosody hypothesis ; Fodor, 2002), and some on structural-semantic properties of NP preceding the pronoun (Construal ; Frazier & Clifton, 1996). The discussion on parsing strategies and attachment preferences is still far from being resolved. Current study represents the first step towards a more robust research (combining both off-line and on-line eye tracking experiments) on parsing strategies and attachment preferences in Croatian, within the underspecification and construal framework. The aim of the presentation is to show preliminary findings on off-line attachment preferences, following the predictions that the semantic relationship between two potential antecedent NPs influences preferences. Ninety adult speakers filled the forced-choice questionnaire on attachment preferences in globally ambiguous (GA) RCs, consisting of both genitive forms (equivalent to English of) and thematically licencing prepositions (equivalent to English with, on, etc). Despite the predictions of construal, speakers in general preferred high attachment. The next step is to conduct a robust on-line study in which 1) participants’ WM capacity will be measured and controlled for in order to rule out its influence on preferences (i.e. Mendelsohn & Pearlmutter, 1999 ; Traxler, 2007 ; Swets, 2007) ; and 2) stimuli with genitive and locative NPs will be controlled for length, subject position of NPs and frequency. Ambiguity will be resolved by gender agreement and plausibility. As this is the study in progress, only preliminary data will be presented.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Logopedija, Filologija, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti

POVEZANOST RADA