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This book argues in favour of cross-linguistic variation in sentence processing by providing empirical data from ambiguity resolution in Greek as L1 and L2. It is maintained that in highly inflected languages, like Greek, initial parsing decisions are determined by the interaction of morphological and lexical cues rather than by universal parsing principles.
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CROSS-LINGUISTIC VARIATION IN SENTENCE PROCESSING STUDIES IN THEORETICAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS VOLUME 36 Managing Editors Lyn Frazier, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Thomas Roeper, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Kenneth Wexler, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Editorial Board Robert Berwick, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Matthew Cocker, Saarland University, Germany Janet Dean Fodor, City University of New York, New York Angela Friederici, Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany Merrill Garrett, University of Arizona, Tucson Lila Gleitman, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Chris Kennedy, Northwestern University, Illinois Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany Howard Lasnik, University of Connecticut at Storrs Yukio Otsu, Keio University, Tokyo Andrew Radford, University of Essex, U.K. The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume. CROSS-LINGUISTIC VARIATION IN SENTENCE PROCESSING Evidence from RC Attachment Preferences in Greek DESPOINA PAPADOPOULOU University of Crete, Greece A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN-10 1-4020-4689-8 (HB) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-4689-6 (HB) ISBN-10 1-4020-4690-1 (e-book) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-4690-2 (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2006 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recordingor otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. TABLE OF CONTENTS ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2 SENTENCE PROCESSING MODELS 2.1. Universal Sentence Processing Models 2.1.1. The Garden Path model 2.1.2. Construal theory 2.2. Parameterised Models of Parsing 2.2.1. The Modifier-straddling strategy 2.2.2. The Anaphor Resolution model 2.2.3. The Recency/Predicate Proximity model 2.3. Experience-based Models of Sentence Processing 2.3.1. The Tuning theory 2.3.2. Constraint Satisfaction approaches 2.4. Summary and Conclusions CHAPTER 3 ASPECTS OF THE GRAMMAR OF GREEK 3.1. Relative Clauses in Greek 3.1.1. The relativization process in Greek 3.1.2. Pu-RCs in Greek 3.2. Possessive Genitives 3.2.1. Syntactic analyses of possessive genitives 3.3. The preposition me (with) 3.4. Summary and Conclusions v 9 9 11 17 23 24 25 28 32 33 36 42 51 51 53 58 62 64 66 68 vi CHAPTER CHAPTER CONTENTS 4 5 RC ATTACHMENT PREFERENCES IN ISOLATED SENTENCES 73 4.1. Experiment 1: Sentence Completion Questionnaire 4.1.1. Method 4.1.2. Results 4.1.3. Discussion 4.2. Experiment 2: Self-Paced Reading Task 4.2.1. Method 4.2.2. Results 4.2.3. Discussion 78 78 81 82 82 83 90 93 CONTEXT EFFECTS IN RC ATTACHMENT PREFERENCES 5.1. Studies on Context Effects in RC Attachment Preferences 5.2. Exper