MODIFIER ATTACHMENT IN SENTENCE PARSING - EVIDENCE FROM DUTCH

Current theories of parsing suggest a wide variety of mechanisms by wh ich modifiers, such as relative clauses, may be related to constituent s that offer more than one potential attachment site. Some, like the t uning hypothesis, are based on the premise that people's parsing perfo rmance is shaped by prior exposure to language. Others (e.g. garden-pa th theory and construal theory) play down any potential role of past l inguistic experience, stressing instead the varying influences of stru ctural characteristics of the sentence in question. The two views enco urage differing expectations about cross-linguistic variation in parsi ng preference. A questionnaire study and two on-line experiments were carried out to investigate attachment preferences in Dutch. The result s pose a number of problems for the majority of the existing parsing m odels and are clearly inconsistent with some of the traditional theori es. In contrast, the findings are compatible with models incorporating parsing mechanisms that are tuned by language experience. The results highlight the need for further corpus studies to subject these accoun ts to more searching scrutiny.