EVIDENCE FOR EARLY-CLOSURE ATTACHMENT ON FIRST-PASS READING TIMES IN FRENCH

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in French with sentences of t he form ''N V N1-of-N2 who... '' Example: ''A journalist approached th e barrister (male) of the singer (female) who seemed more confident (m asculine or feminine gender) than (s)he ought to be.'' The results are consistent with those of Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). French readers, like Spanish readers, prefer early closure (and are garden-pathed when the sentence turns out to be a late-closure attachment). This effect was exhibited by first-pass reading times that are usually assumed to reflect initial syntactic commitments. These results are discussed in relation to Frazier and Clifton's recent proposals concerning attachme nt mechanisms in the case of ''non-primary'' relationships such as rel ative clauses, and more precisely the notion that early-closure attach ments observed in cross-linguistic studies are determined by relativel y late processes.