Relative clause attachment in Dutch: On-line comprehension corresponds to corpus frequencies when lexical variables are taken into account
Desmet, Brysbaert, and De Baecke (2002a) showed that the production of
relative clauses following two potential attachment hosts (e.g., ‘Someone
shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony’) was influenced by
the animacy of the first host. These results were important because they
refuted evidence from Dutch against experience-based accounts of syntactic
ambiguity resolution, such as the tuning hypothesis. However, Desmet et al.
did not provide direct evidence in favour of tuning, because their study
focused on production and did not include reading experiments. In the
present paper this line of research was extended. A corpus analysis and an
eye-tracking experiment revealed that when taking into account lexical
properties of the NP host sites (i.e., animacy and concreteness) the frequency
pattern and the on-line comprehension of the relative clause attachment
ambiguity do correspond. The implications for exposure-based accounts of
sentence processing are discussed.
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