High vs Low: Attachment Preferences of Native and Non-native Speakers in Discourse Structure

To date, there has been no research to examine the question of whether and to what extent syntactic attachment preferences in speakers' native languages (L1) mirror their pragmatic attachment preferences. If similar behaviour is shown for both the syntactic and the pragmatic domains, such parallels would shed light on possible underlying language specific, yet domain spanning, structures. It could be hypothesised that speakers acquire one set of language specific preferences with their native language and utilise them across different levels of linguistic representation. The research conducted for this study, however, indicates that this is not the case, but rather that there is an overall preference for high attachment in discourse, independent of whether the native language of participants is German (high/non-local syntactic attachment preference) or English (low/local syntactic attachment preference). Likewise, there have been no studies on any potential influence that the presence or absence of pragmatic cues might have on attachment decisions. These cues are used to help readers comprehend the discourse and to ease processing costs for native speakers of the language in which they are presented. When L2 speakers encounter these cues, however, it is possible that their processing abilities are taxed too much by the, literally, foreign cues. This will cause L2 speakers to behave differently from L1 speakers. The findings of this study suggest that both of these assumptions might be the case. Attachment behaviour differs depending on the presence or the absence of the ‘On the one hand,’ cue, which is used to signal that an inconsistency will follow. Presence of the cue increased high attachment overall. German L1 speakers, completing the study in their L2 English, overall attached high more often than both German L1 speakers completing the study in German and English L1 speakers in Englis