Sentence processing strategies in adults and children: PP attachment in corpora and psycholinguistic experiments

Abstract

The main aim of the present thesis is to investigate the extent to which lexical, frequency and language?specific grammatical factors affect Greek native speakers’ online attachment decisions for temporary ambiguous prepositional phrases. An analysis of a written corpus sample (ILSP corpus) and a sample of spoken language was conducted in order to assess the frequency of PP attachment in V?NP?PP structures. The corpus data were analysed on two levels (coarse grained vs. fine grained) in order to test the predictions of the Tuning Hypothesis (Mitchell et al., 1995) which predicts that the parser is expected to be “tuned” only to syntactic category (coarse?grained) information during on?line sentence comprehension. The analysis of the corpus data on a level at which only sentences with the prepositions me, se, apo and ja were taken into account allowed us to investigate whether frequency patterns are reflected on native Greek speakers’ online parsing preferences for sentences that included these four prepositions. In addition, the finegrained corpus analysis also included an examination of whether definiteness agreement in Greek extends to complex object DPs with prepositions me, se, apo and ja (see Stavrou & Tsimpli, 2009). Three groups of participants were recruited for the psycholinguistic tasks of the present study: two groups of monolingual Greek adults and a group of native Greek 11 to 12 year old children. The first group of adults conducted an off?line acceptability task including sentences in which PPs were either forced towards VP or NP attachment. The results indicated that acceptability ratings differed depending on the lexical choice of Ps in the sentences. The results of the second task, an online SPR task verified the results of the acceptability to a large extent. In addition, the analysis of participants’ mean reading times indicated that definiteness agreement had an effect on online processing but it largely depended on the choice of the preposition. The investigation of children’s online parsing preferences revealed that children at the age of 11 to 12 employ essentially the same parsing strategies as adults but are less sensitive to lexical information than adults. Taken together, the results of the corpus analyses and the psycholinguistic data indicated that although there is a degree of correspondence between frequency counts and parsing preferences, frequency alone cannot account for the pattern of the results of the present study.