written by Alex Cairncross (University of Cambridge)

Successful language comprehension requires hearers/readers to resolve ambiguities which can arise at various levels of representation. For example, in (1) there a syntactic ambiguity as the bracketed relative clause (RC) may modify either the son or the doctor. These two readings are known as the high attachment (HA) and low attachment (LA) readings respectively.

1. a. Gianni ha visto il figlio₁ del medico₂ [che correva la maratona].

1. b. Gianni saw the son₁ of the doctor₂ [that was running the marathon].

Traditional psycholinguistic models assumed that when presented with this kind of ambiguity, a universal principle of locality (e.g. LATE CLOSURE, Frazier 1978) would guide hearers/readers to prefer LA. Since Cuetos & Mitchell (1988) however, we have known that speakers of different languages exhibit contrasting biases in their interpretation of sentences like those in (1). While speakers of languages like English have been found to exhibit the expected LA preference, speakers of languages like Spanish and Italian have been observed to exhibit an unexpected preference for HA.

Following Grillo (2012) and Grillo and Costa (2014), this crosslinguistic difference in attachment biases is due to a hidden structural difference, namely the existence of pseudorelatives (PRs) in some languages but not others. While identical to true RCs on the surface, PRs exhibit a number of structural and semantic differences. Crucially, if the embedded clause in (1) is parsed as a PR, this forces a HA interpretation. Thus Grillo & Costa (2014) suggest their PR-FIRST HYPOTHESIS. This basically states that when we are presented with strings as in (1) we universally prefer PR readings over RC ones, all other things being equal. In a language like Italian or Spanish this would drive the observed HA bias. In a language like English, which lacks PRs, a LA bias with true RCs is expected.

Independently however, it has been observed that prolonged exposure to a second language (L2) during adulthood may affect parser biases in one’s first language (L1), a phenomenon known as attrition. While native speakers of Spanish have been repeatedly shown to exhibit a HA bias (e.g. Cuetos & Mitchell 1988, Carreiras & Clifton 1993, 1999), after migrating to an English-speaking country, previous studies using both online and offline measures have found that native speakers of Spanish begin to exhibit a LA bias in their L1 (Dussias 2003, 2004, Dussias & Sagarra 2007).

Thus, on the one hand it has been argued that we can derive the differences between languages from a set of universal parser biases once PRs are taken into account. On the other, it has been observed that parser biases may change within an individual speaker in certain multilingual contexts. How to reconcile these two positions is unclear as the multilingual studies predated the PR account and so did not take PRs into account. In response, I am conducting a series of experiments to explore the attrition of parser biases in a new language pair, L1-Italian, L2-English. In the stimuli for these experiments, PR availability is always directly manipulated so that we can try and disentangle which parser biases (i.e. locality or PR-firstness) are affected by attrition.

Thanks to the fieldwork funding provided by the Philological Society, I was able to travel to the Italy to conduct an eye-tracking-while-reading experiment with native speakers still living in their L1 community. That experiment serves two purposes. First, it will allow us to test some predictions made by the PR account regarding online language processing. Second, these participants will serve as a control group against which to test L1 Italian speakers living in the UK. Although recruitment of the UK based group is still ongoing, results from the group in Italy do provide partial support for the PR account. In items in which PRs were blocked in Italian, participants exhibited a clear and early online LA bias with true RCs. When PRs were available however, the expected HA bias was not observed in online measures but did surface in the accuracy to comprehension questions for the same items.

References

Carreiras, M., & Clifton, C. (1993). Relative clause interpretation preferences in Spanish and English. Language and Speech, 36, 353–372.

Carreiras, M., & Clifton, C. (1999). Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eyetracking evidence from Spanish and English. Memory & Cognition, 27(5), 826–833. doi: 10.3758/bf03198535

Cuetos, F., & Mitchell, D. C. (1988). Cross-Linguistic Differences in Parsing: Restrictions on the use of the Late Closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition, 30(1), 73–105. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2

Dussias, P. E. (2003). Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in L2 Learners: Some effects of bilinguality on L1 and L2 processing strategies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25(4), 529–557. doi: 10.1017/s0272263103000238

Dussias, P. E. (2004). Parsing a first language like a second: The erosion of L1 parsing strategies in Spanish-English bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8(3), 355–371. doi: 10.1177/13670069040080031001

Dussias, P. E., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on syntactic parsing in Spanish–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(1), 101–116. doi: 10.1017/s1366728906002847

Frazier, L. (1978). On Comprehending Sentences: Syntactic parsing strategies (Doctoral dissertation). University of Connecticut.

Grillo, N. (2012). Local and Universal. In V. Bianchi & C. Chesi (Eds.), Enjoy linguistics! papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his 60th birthday (pp. 234–245). Siena, Italy: CISCL Press. Retrieved from https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/110188/

Grillo, N., & Costa, J. (2014). A Novel Argument for the Universality of Parsing Principles. Cognition, 133(1), 156–187. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.05.019