When relative clauses are preferred. An unexpected garden path and its consequences for sentence processing and syntax (original) (raw)
Two eye-tracking experiments were designed to investigate a novel temporal ambiguity between object relative clauses (object RCs; 'the claim that John made is false)' and complement clauses of a noun (CCs; 'the claim that John made a mistake...') in Italian and English. This study has three main goals: the first is to assess whether a temporary ambiguity between a RC and CC structure gives rise to a garden path effect; the second, is to consider the potential implications of this effect in relation to current parsing theories and determine whether it is compatible with the predictions drawn from the family of reanalysis-based two-stages models (a.o. Frazier 1987; Traxler, Pickering & Clifton 1998; Van Gompel, Pickering & Traxler 1999); the third is to evaluate competing syntactic analysis for CC structures. A more traditional analysis of CCs will be compared with a recent proposal presented in Cecchetto & Donati (2011) and Donati & Cecchetto (2015). We will show that only this latter account is consistent with our experimental findings.
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Relative clauses and more generally clauses modifying nouns have been at the center of a long debate in the last forty years, opposing largely diverging syntactic analyses, comparing relevant data and discussing perspectives. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by adding novel experimental data on how these structures are processed in an online reading task. Two eye-tracking experiments were designed to investigate the temporal structural ambiguity that can arise between object relative clauses (object RCs; 'the claim that linguists made is a mistake)' and so-called complement clauses of a noun (CCs; 'the claim that linguists made a mistake...') in Italian and English. Although the pattern is complex, the results of both experiments suggest that a reanalysis effect is associated with CCs, showing an initial preference for the object RC structural interpretation. The implications of our results are discussed in relation to competing syntactic analyses for CCs ad RCs.
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