engleski

Parsing strategies and attachment preferences in Croatian language: globally ambiguous syntactic constructions and working memory capacity

Parsing refers to the processes involved in constructing syntactic structures during language comprehension. These processes are largely incremental. However, it remains debatable what predominately drives the parser and affects parsing strategies, i.e. what sources of information people rely on during sentence processing. The most influential are modular models (i.e., garden path, with principles of minimal attachment and late closure, where the parser first employs syntactic information), and interactive models (i.e., constraint-based, where all sources of information are immediately drawn upon). Late closure, or the preference for the words/phrases to be attached to the current clause applies in English, but findings from other languages which showed that comprehenders prefer high (less recent) attachment in relative clauses challenged the universality of the garden path. Since 2000s new models appeared, suggesting that the parser is unrestricted and underspecified. They were constructed from the observations of parsing globally ambiguous sentences compared to those where the referent is attached high or low. These findings are interesting, but nevertheless other things have to be taken into account, such as the properties of the language examined, and peoples’ working memory capacity. Findings regarding the influence of WM capacity (tested using the reading span test) on attachment preference and parsing remains uncertain. Taken all this into account, the motivation for the doctoral thesis is to examine attachment preferences in Croatian language regarding its linguistic properties and WM capacity of the subjects by possibly including high- and low- span readers, and to further test the underspecification of the parser.

Parsing ; Attachment preferences ; Globally ambiguous sentences ; Working memory

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