engleski

Challenges in psycholinguistic studies: building a clean design without violating language. A study on parsing strategies and attachment preferences

Even though incremental processes involved in constructing syntactic structures during language comprehension (i.e. parsing) have been studied for years, it remains debatable what predominately drives the parser and affects parsing strategies. The most influential are still modular (i.e. syntax first) and interactive models. Late closure, or the preference for the words to be attached to the current clause applies in English, but findings from other languages revealed that readers sometimes prefer high attachment (HA) in processing relative clauses (e.g. The son of the driver that had the moustache was pretty cool), thus challenging the universality of the parser. Discoveries regarding the role of intra-language factors (types of noun phrases that precede relative pronouns) and individual differences (WM capacity) in parsing added more to the overall complexity. In line with previous research, current study aims at determining what influences parsing strategies and attachment preferences in Croatian, based on off-line (questionnaire) attachment preferences in globally ambiguous (GA) sentences, as well as on-line (eye- tracking) experiments, in which stimuli are carefully designed and controlled ; they consist of genitive and locative NPs that precede the pronoun in GA, HA and LA conditions, and ambiguity is resolved with plausibility or agreement. Since this is a study-in-progress, the results will not be discussed. Rather, the aim of this presentation is three- fold: 1) to present literature review on parsing and to sum up current findings on sentence processing and attachment preferences across languages ; 2) to highlight the challenges behind designing similar psycholinguistic studies (i.e., participant selection, stimuli construction, analyses, WM capacity measures etc.) ; and 3) to outline basic concepts of the planned study, bearing in mind current findings and pre- discussed methodological challenges.

Psycholinguistic studies ; Challenges ; Parsing ; Language

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