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

Testing the effect of an arbitrary subject pronoun on relative clause comprehension

A study on the comprehension of object relative clauses in which different types of pronouns are embedded. The study tests the effect of pronouns' referential properties on Hebrew-speaking children's and adults' syntactic comprehension

Discourse accessibility constraints in children's processing of object relative clauses

A study on children's comprehension and on-line processing of object relative clauses in which a 1sr or a 3rd-person pronoun is embedded, as compared to object relatives without a pronoun

An experimental approach to nominal tense: Evidence from Pomak (Slavic)

This article presents the first experimental evidence on nominal tense. Data are from Pomak, a Slavic variety that makes use of a deictic suffix for referents in the interlocutor’s sphere and for past-modal reference. Forty L1-Pomak participants completed an acceptability judgment task (in Pomak) and two reaction-time experiments using auditory stimuli (in L1 Pomak and in L2 Greek). In the Pomak reaction-time experiment, in particular, participants listened to NPs with temporal reference marked either purely grammatically, with a deictic suffix, or grammatically and semantically/pragmatically. As predicted, responses were accurate and fast in grammatical-only items even though success rates improved for nominals that had additional semantic and pragmatic temporal reference. To conclude, our study confirms that Pomak deictic suffixes provide temporal information at the level of the NP and introduces a method that could be used to test the existence of nominal tense in other languages

The acquisition of French ambiguous embedded structures introduce by ce que

International audienc

The acquisition of French ambiguous embedded structures introduce by ce que

International audienc