Cross-linguistic variation in sentence processing : evidence from RC attachment preferences in Greek / Despoina Papadopoulou.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Papadopoulou, Despoina.

Series:

Studies in theoretical psycholinguistics ; v. 36.

Studies in theoretical psycholinguistics ; v. 36

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Greek language, Modern--Sentences.

Greek language, Modern.

Greek language, Modern--Psychological aspects.

Psycholinguistics.

Psychological aspects.

Physical Description:

x, 247 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Dordrecht : Springer, [2006]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Chapter 2 Sentence Processing Models 9

2.1 Universal Sentence Processing Models 9

2.1.1 The Garden Path model 11

2.1.2 Construal theory 17

2.2 Parameterised Models of Parsing 23

2.2.1 The Modifier-straddling strategy 24

2.2.2 The Anaphor Resolution model 25

2.2.3 The Recency/Predicate Proximity model 28

2.3 Experience-based Models of Sentence Processing 32

2.3.1 The Tuning theory 33

2.3.2 Constraint Satisfaction approaches 36

Chapter 3 Aspects of the Grammar of Greek 51

3.1 Relative Clauses in Greek 51

3.1.1 The relativization process in Greek 53

3.1.2 Pu-RCs in Greek 58

3.2 Possessive Genitives 62

3.2.1 Syntactic analyses of possessive genitives 64

3.3 The preposition me (with) 66

Chapter 4 RC Attachment Preferences in Isolated Sentences 73

4.1 Experiment 1: Sentence Completion Questionnaire 78

4.1.2 Results 81

4.2 Experiment 2: Self-Paced Reading Task 82

4.2.2 Results 90

Chapter 5 Context Effects in RC Attachment Preferences 101

5.1 Studies on Context Effects in RC Attachment Preferences 102

5.2 Experiment 3: Sentence Completion Questionnaire 107

5.2.2 Results 111

5.3 Experiment 4: Self-Paced Reading Task 114

5.3.2 Results 117

Chapter 6 Ambiguity Resolution Strategies in a Second Language 129

6.1 L2 Ambiguity Resolution Studies 131

6.1.1 The subject vs. object ambiguity 131

6.1.2 The main clause vs. reduced relative clause ambiguity 136

6.1.3 The PP-attachment ambiguity 139

6.1.4 The RC attachment ambiguity 141

6.2 RC Attachment Preferences in Greek as L2 145

6.2.1 Background information and Proficiency of the L2 learners in Greek 149

6.2.2 Experiment 5: Grammaticality judgement task 153

6.2.3 Experiment 6: Acceptability judgement task 159

6.2.4 Experiment 7: Self-paced reading task (SPRT) 167.

Notes:

Based on a Ph.D. thesis--University of Essex, 2002.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-242) and index.

ISBN:

9781402046896

1402046898

1402046901

OCLC:

72145136

Publisher Number:

9781402046896

9781402046902