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Garden path sentences

591B
Second language acquisition 1.  The horse raced past the barn fell.
Psycholinguistics:
relative clauses in online and offline
tasks

Sentence processing
Someone
shot 1.  Someone shot [the servant] of [the actress]
the servant who was on the balcony
of the actress
who was on the balcony •  High or Low attachement

The garden path model Late closure

•  Frazier 1987 proposes that a single parse is
constructed by a syntactic module. Re-
analysis is costly and leads to an observable
slowdown in reading. When the parser
encounters an ambiguity, it is guided by two
principles: late closure and minimal
attachment.
•  Late closure causes new words or phrases
to be attached to the current clause.
1.  John said he would leave yesterday
would be parsed as John said (he would leave
yesterday), and not as John said (he would
leave) yesterday (i.e., he spoke yesterday).

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Marie Mary
kissed kissed
John John
and his brother and his brother
when she left started to laugh

Language specific Lexical bias

•  Prefer high-attachment: Spanish, German,
French, Dutch, Russian
The doctor recognized [the pupil]
•  Or low attachment: English, Norwegian, with [the nurse] who was feeling very tired
Swedish, Romanian, BP, Arabic

Minimal attachment The Good enough theory

•  Minimal attachment is a strategy of
parsimony: The parser builds the simplest
syntactic structure possible (that is, the one
with the fewest phrasal nodes).
•  Listeners do not always engage in full
detailed processing of linguistic input.
•  The system has a tendency to develop
shallow and superficial representations
when confronted with some difficulty.

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Method GJT
•  3 groups advanced learners of Greek – 50 RC: 25 gram, 25 ungram
–  18 adults L2, L1 Spanish – 4 conditions:
–  19 adults L2, L1 German •  Gen-high
–  10 adults L2, L1 Russian •  Gen-low
•  PP-high
•  PP-low

Acceptability judgment task

Results on GJT
•  20 sentences •  High score
•  40 fillers •  No difference across group languages

GJT Acceptability judgment task

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Native speakers NNS Results

•  Preference for low attachment for DP •  Low attachment for RC with PP (like
+PP NS)
•  but show no preference in RC
•  For high attachement for DP + DP attachment with DP-gen (unlike NS)