A U-shaped Relative Clause Attachment Preference in Japanese

Abstract

This paper presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuing potential nominal heads. Similar to previous results from the processing of English, Spanish and German, we observed the following non-monotonic preference ordering among the three attachment sites: most local, least local, intermediate. We discuss the result in light of two types of parsing models: models that only consider attaching a modifier to candidate sites whose lexical heads have already been encountered, and models in which predicted categories are also considered as possible modification sites. We contend that the preference to attach to the least local site over the intermediate site argues against the first type of model, and supports the second type of model with a factor such as predicate proximity or anaphor resolution driving the preference to attach the RC to the least local candidate site.