Abstract
One experiment provided evidence in support of Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, and Hickok’s (1996) claim that a recency preference applies to Spanish relative clause attachments, contrary to the claim made by Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). Spanish speakers read stimuli involving either two or three potential attachment sites in which the same lexical content of the two-site conditions appeared in a different structural configuration in the three-site conditions. High attachment was easier than low attachment when only two sites were present, but low attachment was preferred over high attachment, which was in turn preferred over middle attachment, when three sites were present. The experiment replicated earlier results and showed that (1) attachment preferences are determined in part by a preference to attach recently/low, and (2) lexical biases are insufficient to explain attachment preferences.
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The experiments reported in this paper were conducted while V.T. was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research was supported by NIH Fellowship MH10592 to N.J.P. We greatly appreciate the comments and advice of Chuck Clifton, Don Mitchell, Michael Spivey-Knowlton, and one anonymous reviewer.
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Gibson, E., Pearlmutter, N.J. & Torrens, V. Recency and lexical preferences in Spanish. Memory & Cognition 27, 603–611 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211554
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211554