A U-shaped relative clause attachment preference in Japanese

This paper presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanes e investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuin g potential nominal heads. Similar to previous results from the processing of English, Spanish and German, we observed the following non-monotonic pre ference ordering among the three attachment sites: most local, least local, intermediate. We discuss the result in light of two types of parsing model s: models that only consider attaching a modifier to candidate sites whose lexical heads have already been encountered, and models in which predicted categories are also considered as possible modification sites. We contend t hat the preference to attach to the least local site over the intermediate site argues against the first type of model, and supports the second type o f model with a factor such as predicate proximity or anaphor resolution dri ving the preference to attach the RC to the least local candidate site.