Featuring Aniello De Santo, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Utah.

Abstract 

Ambiguity is everywhere in human languages. Consider, for example, a sentence like “I saw the son of the doctor [who was playing the piano]”. This sentence is globally ambiguous, as the construction allows for the relative clause (RC) “[who was playing the piano]” to modify either the first noun (“son”) or the second (“doctor”).  

Notably, languages have been reported to vary with respect of whether their speakers prefer a low attachment interpretation (LA; RC modifies the second noun; e.g. English, Frazier 1996),  or show a high attachment preference (HA; RC modifies the first noun; e.g. Spanish, German, Cuetos & Mitchell 1988; Hemforth et al. 2015). Importantly, these patterns do not align neatly with typological categories — for instance, Romanian speakers reportedly prefer LA despite the structural similarities between Romanian and Spanish (Ehrlich 1999) — and languages seem to exhibit LA or HA preferences to different degrees (Carreiras & Clifton Jr 1993; Swets et al. 2008; Cotter & Ferreira 2024). Additionally, RC interpretation seems to be affected by a number of factors, like the length and position of the RC, semantic properties of the main verb, and individual differences between participants. 

While the resolution of attachment ambiguity in RC has been widely studied in psycholinguistics then, the nature of the mechanisms that drive their disambiguation is far from understood. In this talk, I report recent results from a series of experiments exploring factors affecting RC disambiguation in a number of languages (English, Italian, Korean, Mandarin Chinese). In doing so,  De Santo argues that these systematic cross-linguistic differences in disambiguation preferences make RC attachment an essential case study in investigating the trade-offs between universal sentence processing principles and language-specific properties.