Spanish is not different: On the universality of minimal structure and locality principles

A sensible assumption in psycholinguistics is that universal principles of optimal computation guide structural decisions made during sentence processing. This idea was questioned by the apparent cross-linguistic variation in Relative Clause attachment: a wealth of experimental results from the nineties showed that speakers of Spanish, among other languages, more readily converged towards the least optimal structural resolution (i.e. non-local attachment) challenging the universality of parsing principles of locality. A more recent development in this literature demonstrated that previous results were confounded by the availability of an additional parse, the so-called Pseudo-Relative, in the ill-behaved languages (Grillo, 2012; Grillo & Costa, 2014). Grillo and colleagues further suggested that the parser more readily disambiguates in favour of the Pseudo-Relative reading, when possible, because of its structural and interpretive simplicity in comparison to Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment is a direct consequence of this independent preference. We present novel results in support of this account from two offline forced-choice attachment questionnaires in Spanish. The results show that Pseudo-Relative availability significantly affects attachment preferences and that cross-linguistic variation in Relative Clause attachment is likely to be epiphenomenal and largely attributable to underlying grammatical differences.

在心理语言学中，一个合理的假设是普遍的最优计算原则指导着句子处理过程中的结构决策。这一观点因相对从句附着在跨语言中的明显差异而受到质疑：九十年代的大量实验结果表明，西班牙语等语言的说话者更倾向于接受非最优的结构解决方案（即非局部附着），这对局部解析原则的普遍性提出了挑战。该领域的最新发展表明，先前的研究结果因在表现不佳的语言中存在额外的解析——所谓的伪相对从句——而受到干扰（Grillo，2012；Grillo & Costa，2014）。Grillo及其同事进一步提出，当可能时，解析器更倾向于选择伪相对从句的解读，因为相较于相对从句，其结构和解释的简洁性，非局部附着成为这一独立偏好的直接后果。我们通过两个针对西班牙语的离线强制选择附着问卷调查提供了支持这一观点的新颖结果。结果显示，伪相对从句的可获得性显著影响了附着偏好，且相对从句在跨语言中的附着差异可能是一种伴随现象，主要归因于潜在的语法差异。