Local and Universal

Cuetos and Mitchell 1988, and much subsequent work, report that speakers of different languages differ in Relative Clause attachment preferences in complex NPs. These findings challenged universal theories of processing and in particular the universality of locality in parsing. In this paper, I argue that asymmetries in attachment preference stem from a previously unnoticed grammatical distinction: the availability of Pseudo Relatives. Drawing on previous data and novel results, I conclude that Locality is a genuine universal principle of processing

(Pseudo-)Relatives and prepositional infinitival constructions in the acquisition of European Portuguese

The literature on attachment preferences in relative clauses discusses a crosslinguistic difference in attachment, which, as Fodor (1998a) remarks, poses problems for acquisition. Following previous claims on the universality of the parser, and attempts to explain crosslinguistic variation in attachment with properties of the languages, in particular the availability of pseudo-relatives, we analyzed children's performance in attaching preferences with relative clauses and prepositional infinitival constructions and found that their preferences in parsing are guided by independently needed and crosslinguistically robust principles

Passives are not hard to interpret but hard to remember : evidence from online and offline studies

Passive sentences are considered more difficult to comprehend than active ones. Previous online-only studies cast doubt on this generalization. The current paper directly compares online and offline processing of passivization and manipulates verb type: state vs event. Stative passives are temporarily ambiguous (adjectival vs verbal), eventive passives are not (always verbal). Across 4 experiments (self-paced reading with comprehension questions), passives were consistently read faster than actives. This contradicts the claim that passives are difficult to parse and/or interpret, as argued by main perspectives of passive processing (heuristic or syntactic). The reading time facilitation is compatible with broader expectation/surprisal theories. When comprehension targeted theta-roles assignment, passives were more errorful, regardless of verb type. Verbal WM measures did not correlate with the difference in accuracy, excluding it as an explanation. The accuracy effect is argued to reflect a post-interpretive difficulty associated with generating/maintaining a propositional representation of passives required by specific tasks

Prosody of classic garden path sentences : The horse raced faster when embedded

Prosody, it is assumed, does not always disambiguate syntax. We investigate one classic case at point from the psycholinguistics literature: garden path sentences involving the main-verb vs. reduced relative clause contrast (the horse raced past the barn (and) fell). Despite their centrality in shaping theoies of sentence processing, no experimental work to date has investigated the prosody of these sentences. We show that, contrary to previous assumptions (Fodor 2002, Wagner & Watson 2010), this contrast is prosodically disambiguated, but that this disambiguation can only be observed when the relevant clauses are embedded within a matrix clause which provides a baseline pace. Prosodic disambiguation obtains through pace modulation, with faster pace associated with the embedded/reduced relative reading and regular pace (no change) with the main-verb analysis. The essential contribution of the matrix sentence is to provide a baseline pace without which it is impossible to establish whether a change took place. Importantly, duration is solely determined by prosody and independent from complexity: faster pace is associated with the more complex structure

Seeing events vs. entities : The processing advantage of Pseudo Relatives over Relative Clauses.

We present the results of three offline questionnaires (one attachment preference study and two acceptability judgments) and two eye-tracking studies in French and English, investigating the resolution of the ambiguity between pseudo relative and relative clause interpretations. This structural and interpretive ambiguity has recently been shown to play a central role in the explanation of apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries in relative clause attachment (Grillo & Costa, 2014; Grillo et al., 2015). This literature has argued that pseudo relatives are preferred to relative clauses because of their structural and interpretive simplicity. This paper adds to this growing body of literature in two ways. First we show that, in contrast to previous findings, French speakers prefer to attach relative clauses to the most local antecedent once pseudo relative availability is controlled for. We then provide direct support for the pseudo relative preference: grammatically forced disambiguation to a relative clause interpretation leads to degraded acceptability and greater processing cost in a pseudo relative environment than maintaining compatibility with a pseudo relative

Processing unambiguous verbal passives in German

Passivization played a central role in shaping both linguistic theory and psycholinguistic approaches to sentence processing, language acquisition and impairment. We present the results of two experiments that simultaneously test online processing (self-paced reading) and offline comprehension (through comprehension questions) of passives in German while also manipulating the event structure of the predicates used. In contrast to English, German passives are unambiguously verbal, allowing for the study of passivization independent of a confound in the degree of interpretive ambiguity (verbal/adjectival). In English, this ambiguity interacts with event structure, with passives of stative predicates naturally receiving an adjectival interpretation. In a recent study, Paolazzi et al. (2015, 2016) showed that in contrast to the mainstream theoretical perspective, passive sentences are not inherently harder to process than actives. Complexity of passivization in English is tied to the aspectual class of the verbal predicate passivized: With eventive predicates, passives are read faster (as hinted at in previous literature) and generate no comprehension difficulties (in contrast to previous findings with mixed predicates). Complexity effects with passivization, in turn, are only found with stative predicates. The asymmetry is claimed to stem from the temporary adjectival/verbal ambiguity of stative passives in English. We predict that the observed difficulty with English stative passives disappears in German, given that in this language the passive construction under investigation is unambiguously verbal. The results support this prediction: Both offline and online there was no difficulty with passivization, under either eventive or stative predicates. In fact, passives and their rich morphology eased parsing across both types of predicates