A universal parser or language specific parsing strategies: A study on relative clause attachment preference in Turkish
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Tarih
2019
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Erişim Hakkı
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Özet
This study investigated syntactic priming of relative clause (RC) attachment preferences inmonolingual Turkish speakers through a series of experiments. Cross-linguistic variations in RCattachment preferences have implied that parsing strategies may not be guided by universalprinciples but language-specific parameters. Thus, several models put forth their assumptions aboutthe universality of the parser and the underlying mechanisms working in the initial analysis, and thesources of information used in sentence processing. However, there is not one single model, thepredictions of which could account for all the contradictory findings obtained in a myriad of studiesusing different materials and tasks in different languages. In order to investigate RC attachmentpreferences further in detail, we conducted two offline (pen-and-paper) tasks and an online (selfpacedreading) task. The results showed that monolingual Turkish speakers had no clear attachmentpreferences on condition that several confounding factors were controlled. More precisely, RCattachment preferences varied depending on the semantic factors (e.g. semantic associations of thehost NP with the proximal and the distal predicate), task requirements (e.g. implicit or directed), andtechniques (e.g. offline or online) employed in the studies. Nonetheless, the effect of syntactic primingshowed that monolingual Turkish speakers distinguished the tree hierarchical configuration of thealternative attachment interpretations. Furthermore, the results suggested that a tendency towardsNP1 attachment preference might be attributed to processing difficulty, as a strategy to minimizecognitive demand, arising from conditions such as structural complexity (active vs. passive), taskrequirements, and research design (offline vs. online, or directed attention vs. implicit processing).
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Ö6
