Constantijn De Baecke’s research while affiliated with Ghent University and other places

Desmet, Brysbaert, and De Baecke (2002a) showed that the production of relative clauses following two potential attachment hosts (e.g., `Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony') was influenced by the animacy of the first host. These results were important because they refuted evidence from Dutch against experience-based accounts of syntactic ambiguity resolution, such as the tuning hypothesis. However, Desmet et al. did not provide direct evidence in favour of tuning, because their study focused on production and did not include reading experiments. In the present paper this line of research was extended. A corpus analysis and an eye-tracking experiment revealed that when taking into account lexical properties of the NP host sites (i.e., animacy and concreteness) the frequency pattern and the on-line comprehension of the relative clause attachment ambiguity do correspond. The implications for exposure-based accounts of sentence processing are discussed.

An eye movement experiment is reported in which target words of two and four letters were presented in sentences that strongly raised the expectation of a par-ticular word. There were three possible conditions: The expected word was present in the sentence, an unexpected word of the same length was present, or an unexpected word of a different length was present (all continuations were accep-table, but the latter two were difficult to predict). Our first purpose was to test one of the core assumptions of the Extended Optimal Viewing Position model of eye guidance in reading (Brysbaert & Vitu, 1998). This model states that word skip-ping is primarily a function of the length of the upcoming word. It leads to the prediction that an unpredicted two-letter word will be skipped more often than a predicted four-letter word, which is indeed what we observed. Our second aim was to determine if we could obtain an interaction between context predictability and parafoveal word length, by looking at what happens when the length of the parafoveal word does not agree with the length of the expected word. No such interaction was observed although the effects of both word length and predict-ability were substantial. These findings are interpreted as evidence for the hypothesis that visual and language-related factors independently affect word skipping. Denis Drieghe and Timothy Desmet are research assistants of the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders, Belgium). Due to a software error which resulted in an incorrect calculation of the skipping data, this research has previously been presented with slightly different data (Drieghe & Brysbaert, 2001). We thank Keith Rayner, Franc Ëoise Vitu, Sarah White, and an anonymous reviewer for the many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

We examined the production of relative clauses in sentences with a complex noun phrase containing two possible attachment sites for the relative clause (e.g., "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony."). On the basis of two corpus analyses and two sentence continuation tasks, we conclude that much research about this specific syntactic ambiguity has used complex noun phrases that are quite uncommon. These noun phrases involve the relationship between two humans and, at least in Dutch, induce a different attachment preference from noun phrases referring to non-human entities. We provide evidence that the use of this type of complex noun phrase may have distorted the conclusions about the processes underlying relative clause attachment. In addition, it is shown that, notwithstanding some notable differences between sentence production in the continuation task and in coherent text writing, there seems to be a remarkable correspondence between the attachment patterns obtained with both modes of production.