Effect of Relativisers on Attachment Preferences - Report Example

Effect of Relativisers on Attachment Preferences s Religion and Theology Department 20th February Introduction In thevast range of relevant theoretical issues studied by linguistics, the issues of text comprehension has been among the most multifaceted and interesting for research. An individual doesn’t comprehend a language system as a whole, instead, it is text, written or spoken, which is perceived and processed by the human mind. However, perception of phonemes, syllables and intonations does not imply comprehension; whereas perception of sentences does. Sentence comprehension is a process affected by various factors and subject to certain principles, as it is highlighted in various studies. Contemporary theories related to sentence perception assert that there is a set of general cognitive principles applied to the course of processing and common for all languages, e.g. limitations connected to the short-term memory (Carreiras and Clifton, 1993, p.353). However, the specificity of sentence perception differs considerably in cases of foreign languages, where the quality of sentence comprehension in both structural and semantic levels depends of the level of the reader’s proficiency. In reference to sentence perception and reading time, numerous factors are mentioned to influence an individual’s processing of the text. Among them, there is grammatical and syntactic structure, which – in the written language – has long been claimed “to play a major role in the readability of written language, and a number of researchers […] showed that reading comprehension is tied to the structural framework of sentences and they identified various elements within the structure that affected the ease or the difficulty of comprehending written language” (Little, 1975, p.4). In terms of grammar and syntax, ambiguity might produce a considerable impact on comprehension of sentences. As Temperley (2003, p.466) asserts in the light of processing approach, ambiguity makes sentence processing more difficult. According to Marcus (1971), our speech contains many ambiguities, which pose a barrier on our way to extracting the meaning out of the sentence: for instance, repetitions, pauses, extraneous words, various types of grammatical mistakes and incomplete thoughts. Considering this, linguistics seeks to throw some light onto the way people interpret and process ambiguous syntactic constructions (Demestre & Garcı´a-Albea, 2004, p.59). In grammatical ambiguity, certain grammatical categories might confound a reader or a listener, as they might have more than one meaning and hence the sentence’s meaning is likely to be ambiguous, too. The area we are to examine and discuss is use and perception of relative clauses containing ambiguities, which might produce an impact on perception of the sentence. Along with location of the relative clause and its structural complexity, peculiar features of relativiser use are likely to affect comprehension of the sentence. According to grammatical norms, the pronouns used in relative clauses, restrictive and non-restrictive, are likely to predetermine comprehension, including perception of the attachment, to which they refer. It should be mentioned that referential ambiguity is the aspect studied widely by many scholars, including Altmann & Steedman (1988), van Berkum, Brown, & Hagoort (1999) and many others; however, the lion’s share of attention has been given to characteristics of sentence processing in reference to context (Mak et al, 2008, p.170). In English non-restrictive relative clauses, “either the complementizer that or a relative pronoun such as who or which is obligatory in cases where the antecedent or matrix noun phrase is the implied subject of the relative clause” (Temperley, 2003, p.470). However, their use might imply certain ambiguity regarding attachment. In this small research, we will focus on the influence of certain relativisers’ use – for instance, who or that – on perception of the relative clause and formation of the attachment to the subject or object of the main clause via strategic aspect of ambiguity avoidance. Generally, the issue to be investigated implies the way and extent, to which the form of the relative pronoun can influence the attachment. At the same time, it needs to be mentioned that ambiguity is claimed to be minimized in restrictive relative clauses die to the absence of pronoun choice, therefore, the type of clauses we are to use as trial items will include non-restrictive relative clauses, as they are likely to presuppose much ambiguity, and restrictive relative clauses to see if the choice of relativiser affects formation of attachment. Moreover, considering the fact that the character of sentence perception is claimed to differ in native speakers and non-natives, the aspect which can be set as the additional focus of the research is whether the form of the relativiser influences attachment preferences to equal extent in high-proficiency non-natives and native speakers. As far as attachment preferences in embedded relative clauses might affect attachment preferences, the hypotheses to be checked are the following: H1) use of complementizer that doesn’t produce considerable effect on attachment preferences; H2) use of complementizer that confounds attachment formation in relative clauses; H3) use of the relative pronoun who confounds attachment formation in relative clauses; H4) use of relative pronoun who produces little effect on attachment preferences; H5) Use of complementizer that produces more ambiguity in attachment preferences than the relative pronoun who does; H6) Form of relativiser affects attachment preferences. Method Using the method of between subject experiment for empirical data collection and testing the conditions separately, two groups of participants were formed for testing, with each of them being exposed to a certain condition. In case of testing influence of relativiser use on attachment interpretation, conditions a and b will be use of that and who; the first group will experience condition a, and the second group will encounter condition b. The sample of the experiment includes 24 students of various educational establishments aged 18 to 23 years and living in the UK; these are 8 female and 16 male students descending from various backgrounds, who agreed to take part in this experiment and whose safety was ensured. Among the participants, 18 were native English speakers and six were high-proficiency speakers of English as a foreign language. As far as this is a between subject experiment, a list of trials was conducted with two groups of participants exposed to different conditions and performing different tasks aimed at testing the effect of the dependent variable, which is the relativiser used in the sentences. The experiment was performed in two trials, as one of the groups needed to be offered both restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses with who and another group faced two different sets of items including that. In other words, dependent variable were manipulated to collect the data. Each trial consisted of 20 sentences with either that or who, including fillers. The trials were conducted in the calm relaxed setting with few distractions in order to obtain most plausible response form the participants. The latter were divided into two groups, each incorporating 12 people (4 females and 8 males) and three non-native speakers among them. The participants were informed about the essence of the experiment and offered offline questionnaires including the sets of semantically neutral sentences with relative clauses. It is well known that ambiguity arises in such sentences, when “a relative clause follows a complex noun phrase” (Marefat & Meraji, 2005, p.111). As a form of experiment control, we varies complexity of syntactic structures and order of presentation, presenting sequences of sentences in random order: thereby, the items presented to the participants could be 3, 5, 9, 11 and so on, and randomization was performed manually, because the questionnaires were printed. The items containing conditions under consideration were mixed with a number of distracting sentences irrelevant for the experiment; these fillers didn’t include relative clauses containing who or that. A certain number of distractors was added to interrupt the sequence of the target sentences, so that our sentence perception test material isn’t too salient. The primary task the participants were expected to complete in the course of the trials is defining the attachment of the relativiser after perceiving the sentence; moreover, both groups experienced two types of item presentation: half of the item list was presented in the auditory manner and another half was presented in the written form available for reading. In both cases, the participants were expected to write down the nominal phrase due to their attachment preferences. On the other hand, this enabled defining whether there was a difference in ambiguity handling with the mentioned ways of sentence presentation. The items containing relative clauses with the complementizer that presented to the second group during both trials were of the following type: 1. Yesterday, I accidentally met the friend of my sister that joined us at our vacation a year ago. 2. A woman greeted the author of the book that was extremely popular in England those days. The participants were asked to pars the offered sentences from the standpoint of syntactic structure during both of trials, perceiving the items visually and audibly. At the same time, the first group of participants encountered different types of relative sentences with the pronoun who: restrictive and nonrestrictive. However, as far as restrictive relative clauses – according to grammar rules – require comas framing them, and as far as this punctuation peculiarity (principal for sentence comprehension) might be lost in auditory presentation; the second trial items were presented both audibly and visually (moreover, way of presentation was equal both for items and fillers in order not to make the principle items too obvious). Results The empirical data obtained at the experiment brought rather interesting results. Most of the participants in the first group (dealing with who) – two thirds – tended to show attachment preferences to the second noun phrase in the process of ambiguity resolution: e. g. The secretary of Mr. Jones who works in this office was promoted. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that this tendency was present both in audibly and visually presented items. In the items of the second trial, i.e. those containing restrictive relative clauses, almost all the participants chose the second noun phrase as the attachment of the relative pronoun who: e. g. The police shot the friend of the rock star, who threw a part last weekend. Such prevalence of the second NP in this trial could be explained by the more restrictive and transparent nature of the relations between the principal and the relative clause. The second group of participants dealing with that sentences has shown a relatively higher level of ambiguity in defining the noun phrase, to which the relativiser was attached, in both trials regardless of the way of item presentation. Some of the participants reported that the complexity of the task was increased by the fact that the relativiser could theoretically be attached both to animate and inanimate objects, whereas the first group dealt with the relative pronoun who could refer only to animate nouns: e.g. Do you know the director of the movie that is on America’s top 10? At the same time, it should be mentioned, that the judgments of the participant wasn’t biased by the gender aspect: the tendency of attachment preferences was relatively similar both for female and male students. However, six non-native English speakers with high-proficiency level in English demonstrated somewhat more errors in attachment formation in both groups. Discussion The results of the between subject experiment conducted in two groups of participants facing two different conditions reveals the character of attachment preferences depending on the type of the relativiser used in the relative clause. First of all, speaking about the first group (seeing items with who), one should mention that the second trial has confirmed the claim that presence of the restrictive relative clause minimizes ambiguity in attachment formation, because the lion’s share of participants have defined the attachment in the second noun phrase with no significant difficulties, with the sentences being presented both audibly and visually. Resolution of ambiguities contained in the items of the first trial for both groups and the second trial for the second group generally confirms the assertion of the scholars about the nature of attachment preference in English: “references in ambiguity resolution are either low attachment (RC attachment to NP2) or high attachment (RC attachment to NP1)” with low attachment being the most common for English speakers (Han, 2011, p.228). Furthermore, the results indicate that the difference in ambiguity resolution in relative clauses is partially predetermined by the form of the relativiser, because we have seen that the group dealing with the complemetizer that found finding the right attachment more difficult, whereas the relativiser guised in the form of the relative pronoun who made the attachment preference more transparent. Conclusion The current experiment has proved to confirm the findings of such scholars as Cuetos & Mitchell (1988), Frazier & Clifton (1996), Carreiras & Clifton (1999) and others in the area of attachment preference stating that “adult native speakers have revealed a preference for the relative clause to be attached to the second noun phrase”, though grammatical rules allow one to associate the relative clause wither with the first or with the second noun phrase (Felser et al., 2003, p.10). However, some limitations are also possible regarding our experiment. As far as the sample included six non-native English speakers, who have proved to experienced more difficulties in defining the attachment in both groups, the specificity of this tendency is left for further research: character of their choice and confounds could be examined from the viewpoint of their native languages, which are likely to leave imprints on their attachment preferences. At the same time, the nature of attachment preference in the second group could be further tested in relation to the specificity of the relativiser, i.e. the fact that it doesn’t directly hint at an animate or inanimate object. Generally, the small study of interrelation between the form of relativiser and the formation of attachment preferences in ambiguous syntactic constructions containing relative clauses has shown that the form of the relativiser produces moderate impact on attachment preferences, causing more difficulties in that clauses. However, the general tendency revealed in the course of data collection and analysis is that in both types of relativisers (relative pronoun who or complemetizer that), English speakers tend to refer the relative clause to the second noun phrase of the principal clause, i.e. low attachment is typical. References ALTMANN, G., & STEEDMAN, M. (1988) Interaction with context during human sentence processing. Cognition, 30, pp. 191- 238. CARREIRAS, M. & CLIFTON, C. (1993) Relative Clause Interpretation Preference in Spanish and English. Language and Speech, 36 (4), pp. 353-372. CARREIRAS, M. & CLIFTON, C. (1999) Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eyetracking evidence from Spanish and English. Memory and Cognition 27, 826-833. CUETOS, F. & MITCHELL, D. (1988) Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: restrictions on the use of the Late Closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition 30, 73-105. DEMESTRE, J. & GARCÍA-ALBEA, J. E. (2004) The on-line resolution of the sentence complement/relative clause ambiguity: evidence from Spanish. Experimental Psychology (Impact Factor: 2.22). 02/2004; 51(1), pp. 59-71. FELSER, C., MARINIS, T. & CLAHSEN, H. (2003) Childrens Processing of Ambiguous Sentences: A Study of Relative Clause Attachment. Language Acquisition, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 127-163. FRAZIER, L. & CLIFTON, C. (1996) Construal, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. GELBUKH, A. (2008) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing: 9th International Conference, CICLing 2008, Haifa, Israel, February 17-23, 2008, Proceedings. Springer Science & Business Media. HAN, H. (2011) Preferences in Ambiguity Resolution of Relative Clauses. Proceedings of The 16th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics, pp. 288-289. [Online] Available from: http://paaljapan.org/conference2011/ProcNewest2011/pdf/poster/P-7.pdf [Accessed February 20, 2015] LITTLE, P. S. (1975) Structural Ambiguity and Reading Comprehension. Annual Meeting of the Transmountain Regional Conference of the International Reading Association (2nd, Calgary, Alberta, November 13-15, 1975). [Online] ERIC. Available from: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED116117.pdf [Accessed February 20, 2015] MAK, W., VONK, W., & SCHRIEFERS, H. (2008) Discourse structure and relative clause processing, Memory & Cognition, 36, 1, pp. 170-181. [Online] CINAHL Complete, EBSCOhost. Available from: http://ejournals.ebsco.com.adams.idm.oclc.org/Direct.asp?AccessToken=5WJJ44FTRB6BQVQW4QSZSUYP49USTRRQ9U&Show=Object [Accessed February 20, 2015] MARCUS, A. (1971) Reading as Reasoning; Reading as Ambiguity: Understanding Sentence Structures. The Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English (61st, Las Vegas, Nov. 25-27, 1971). [Online] ERIC. Available from: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED086950.pdf [Accessed February 20, 2015] MAREFAT, H. & MERAJI, M. (2005) Parsing Preferences in Structurally Ambiguous Relative Clauses: L1 vs. L2. Journal of Humanities Vol. 12 (1), pp. 111-127. TEMPERLEY, D. (2003) Ambiguity Avoidance in English Relative Clauses. Language, Volume 79, number 3, pp. 464-484. van BERKUM, J. J. A., BROWN, C. M., & HAGOORT, P. (1999) Early referential context effects in sentence processing: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Memory & Language, 41, pp. 147- 182. Appendix Sample list of items offered to the first group of participants (1st trial) 1. Do you know the designer of the actress who won two Oscars yesterday? 2. Peter saw the father of Jake who went to the swimming pool with him last year. 3. Who is that young woman sitting at the bar? (filler) 4. The paparazzi photographed the husband of the actress who didn’t like being stalked by cheap tabloids. 5. Do you know who is will be our lecturer next term? (filler) 6. Parents of children who want to take part in the contest are to wait for registration. 7. What do you know about the secretary of the manager who works in sales department? 8. Who is that in our living room? Is he waiting for me? (filler) 9. Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. 10. A cat was usually fed by a couple of my neighbors who lived next door. (filler) 11. The secretary of Mr. Jones who works in this office was promoted. 12. Yesterday, I accidentally met the friend of my sister who joined us at our vacation a year ago. 13. The police arrested the wife of the carpenter who was suspected of aggravated murder. 14. She doesn’t know who will be Annie’s bridesmaid. (filler) 15. I talked to the friend of my husband who was looking very cheerful. 16. This place teems with admirers of the painters who consider cubism one of the most daring artistic approaches. 17. She didn’t mention the name of the man who was to come that evening. 18. Who is your best friend? (filler) 19. The mother of Alicia’s husband who is the doctor will come to the dinner tomorrow. 20. Andy was very glad to see the friend of his wife who was at the party that night. Sample list of items offered to the second group (1st trial) 1. Yesterday, I accidentally met the friend of my sister that joined us at our vacation a year ago. 2. Peter told that the U.S team would lose that game. (filler) 3. A woman greeted the author of the book that was extremely popular in England those days. 4. A cat was usually fed by a couple of my neighbors that lived next door. (filler) 5. Lizzy got a present from the girlfriend of Andy that is a chef and bakes delicious birthday cupcakes. 6. Do you know the director of the movie that is on America’s top 10? 7. Did you watch that movie featuring Tom Hiddleston? (filler) 8. Someone shot the servant of the actress that was on the balcony. 9. I would like to talk to the manager of the company that is competent in this area. 10. That was not very nice of you! (filler) 11. Did Sam find the book of the popular author that is studied in their course? 12. Why didn’t the government find the man that had prepared the terroristic attack? 13. Oscar ceremony-2015 will feature the actor of the movie that was rewarded a year ago. 14. The scholars assert that children have shorter memory span than adults do. (filler) 15. Divers found a fragment of the ship that was buried in the Atlantic Ocean. 16. The secretary of Mr. Jones that works in this office was promoted. 17. Why do you think that we cannot feed animals here? (filler) 18. The father of Jay that was present on our wedding is coming to the house-warming party, too. 19. This famous actor found the music score of the film that was under consideration, rather thrilling. 20. I do not like watching that kind of movies on my own. (filler) Sample list of items offered to the first group of participants (2nd trial) 1. Yesterday, I accidentally met the friend of my sister, who joined us at our vacation a year ago. 2. Who is that woman wearing a red dress? (filler) 3. The student committee included the friend of Jay, who was my course mate. 4. The police shot the friend of the rock star, who threw a part last weekend. 5. John talked to the friend of his cousin, who was in Spain. 6. This cat was usually fed by a couple of my neighbors, who lived on the 3rd floor. (filler) 7. The assistant of the chef, who is responsible for desserts, astonished the guests with the delicious panna cotta. 8. Do you know the actor, who played the leading part in “War Horse”? (filler) 9. Someone shot the servant of the actress, who was on the balcony. 10. The paparazzi photographed the fan of the actress, who was dressed in a black dress. 11. Life brings success only to those, who make efforts. (filler) 12. Oscar ceremony-2015 will feature the wife of the actor, who makes lots of charitable donations, will be present at the ceremony this year. 13. The scholars assert that children, who are left-handed, are very talented. (filler) 14. The secretary of the manager, who works in this office, was promoted. 15. The secretary of the lawyer, whom I met two years ago, was fired. 16. A woman, who is on the balcony, is an actress. (filler) 17. The friend of Jay, who was present on our wedding, is coming to the house-warming party, too. 18. The father of my roommate, whom I know rather well, is an engineer. 19. Historians know who was responsible for sparking the war. (filler) 20. The friend of my brother, who studies in London, came to visit us. Sample list of items offered to the second group (2nd trial) [The structure of the items list for the second group used in the 2nd trial is similar to that of the 1st trial.] Read More