RECENCY PREFERENCE IN THE HUMAN SENTENCE PROCESSING MECHANISM

Cuetos and Mitchell (1988) observed that in constructions in which a r elative clause can attach to one of two possible sites, English speake rs prefer the more recent attachment site, but Spanish speakers prefer the least recent attachment site, in violation of the proposed univer sal principle Late Closure (Recency Preference), which favors attachme nts to the most recent sites. Based on this evidence, Cuetos and Mitch ell concluded that Late Closure is not a universal principle of the hu man sentence processing mechanism. In this paper, we provide new evide nce from Spanish and English self-paced reading experiments on relativ e clause attachment ambiguities that involve three possible attachment sites. The results of our experiments suggest that a principle like L ate Closure is in fact universally operative in the human parser, but that it is modulated by at least one other factor in the processing of relative clause attachment ambiguities. We propose that the second fa ctor involved in the processing of these and related constructions is the principle of Predicate Proximity, according to which attachments a re preferred to be as structurally close to the head of a predicate ph rase as possible, and we further consider the origins and predictions of the theory combining these two factors.