Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: Effects of Prosodic Breaks and Prosodic Length

The question of how speakers resolve ambiguities when parsing sentences has motivated a great deal of research in sentence processing. A well-known example is provided by the case of relative clause (RC) attachment. As shown in (1), the relative clause (who was on the balcony) can be interpreted as belonging to either the first NP (NP1, the servant) or the second NP (NP2, the actress) within the constituent that forms the direct object of the verb. (1) Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. Languages are known to differ in attachment preferences for relative clauses (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). A language is said to exhibit a high attachment (HA) preference when the RC is more commonly attached to the first NP, whereas a low attachment (LA) preference is shown when the RC is usually interpreted with the second NP. Examples of languages that show a high attachmen