The actress was not on the balcony: testing the Pseudorelative-First Hypothesis in Spanish
Strategies for attachment resolution in double-antecedent relative clauses have been widely studied since the late 1980s, when a seminal study by Cuetos and Michell revealed that the principles of Late Closure and Minimal Attachment were met in some languages but not in others. These principles pred...
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2025-03-01
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| Series: | Frontiers in Psychology |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1546432/full |
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| Summary: | Strategies for attachment resolution in double-antecedent relative clauses have been widely studied since the late 1980s, when a seminal study by Cuetos and Michell revealed that the principles of Late Closure and Minimal Attachment were met in some languages but not in others. These principles predicted a universal preference for low attachment whereas several studies obtained a high attachment preference in Spanish. Since then, high attachment preference has been reported in a variety of languages and with different methods. There have been several attempts at explaining high attachment preference, but none have succeeded. In 2014, the Pseudorelative-First (PR-First) Hypothesis was proposed: it claims that pseudorelative clauses (PRs) are the reason why some languages reveal a preference for high attachment. In this paper, we test the PR-First Hypothesis by means of two self-paced reading experiments in Spanish. Results (reading times and accuracy scores) show an overall preference for HA regardless of PR availability, indicating that the PR-First Hypothesis cannot account for the variation in attachment preferences found in the literature. |
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| ISSN: | 1664-1078 |