Cross-linguistic Variation in Sentence Processing: Evidence From R C Attachment Preferences in Greek (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics Book 36)

"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. During the initial parse, discourse-level information is constrained by lexical considerations, which indicates that the human sentence processor is a multi-stage mechanism. The L2 data show that parsing preferences are not totally determined by frequency records and that L2 sentence processing is mainly guided by lexical information and less so by other sources of information."--Résumé de l'éditeur TABLE OF CONTENTS......Page 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......Page 9 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION......Page 11 2.1. Universal Sentence Processing Models......Page 18 2.1.1. The Garden Path model......Page 20 2.1.2. Construal theory......Page 26 2.2. Parameterised Models of Parsing......Page 32 2.2.1. The Modifier-straddling strategy......Page 33 2.2.2. The Anaphor Resolution model......Page 34 2.2.3. The Recency/Predicate Proximity model......Page 37 2.3. Experience-based Models of Sentence Processing......Page 41 2.3.1. The Tuning theory......Page 42 2.3.2. Constraint Satisfaction approaches......Page 45 2.4. Summary and Conclusions......Page 51 3.1. Relative Clauses in Greek......Page 60 3.1.1. The relativization process in Greek......Page 62 3.1.2. Pu-RCs in Greek......Page 67 3.2. Possessive Genitives......Page 71 3.2.1. Syntactic analyses of possessive genitives......Page 73 3.3. The preposition me (with)......Page 75 3.4. Summary and Conclusions......Page 77 CHAPTER 4: RC ATTACHMENT PREFERENCES IN ISOLATED SENTENCES......Page 81 4.1.1. Method......Page 86 4.1.2. Results......Page 89 4.2. Experiment 2: Self-Paced Reading Task......Page 90 4.2.1. Method......Page 91 4.2.2. Results......Page 98 4.2.3. Discussion......Page 101 CHAPTER 5: CONTEXT EFFECTS IN RC ATTACHMENT PREFERENCES......Page 109 5.1. Studies on Context Effects in RC Attachment Preferences......Page 110 5.2. Experiment 3: Sentence Completion Questionnaire......Page 115 5.2.1. Method......Page 116 5.2.2. Results......Page 119 5.2.3. Discussion......Page 121 5.3.1. Method......Page 122 5.3.2. Results......Page 125 5.3.3. Discussion......Page 131 5.4. Concluding Remarks......Page 134 CHAPTER 6: AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION STRATEGIES IN A SECOND LANGUAGE......Page 137 6.1.1. The subject vs. object ambiguity......Page 139 6.1.2. The main clause vs. reduced relative clause ambiguity......Page 144 6.1.3. The PP-attachment ambiguity......Page 147 6.1.4. The RC attachment ambiguity......Page 149 6.2. RC Attachment Preferences in Greek as L2......Page 153 6.2.1. Background information and Proficiency of the L2 learners in Greek......Page 157 6.2.2. Experiment 5: Grammaticality judgement task......Page 161 6.2.3. Experiment 6: Acceptability judgement task......Page 167 6.2.4. Experiment 7: Self-paced reading task (SPRT)......Page 175 6.2.5. General discussion......Page 181 6.3. Summary......Page 188 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION......Page 192 APPENDIX I......Page 196 APPENDIX II......Page 217 APPENDIX III......Page 226 B......Page 231 C......Page 232 E......Page 234 F......Page 235 H......Page 237 I......Page 238 K......Page 239 M......Page 240 P......Page 242 S......Page 243 T......Page 244 V......Page 245 Z......Page 246 C......Page 247 H......Page 248 N......Page 249 S......Page 250 Z......Page 251 "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. During the initial parse, discourse-level information is constrained by lexical considerations, which indicates that the human sentence processor is a multi-stage mechanism. The L2 data show that parsing preferences are not totally determined by frequency records and that L2 sentence processing is mainly guided by lexical information and less so by other sources of information."--BOOK JACKET