{"693266":{"#nid":"693266","#data":{"type":"event","title":"What do we (really) know about Relative Clause attachment?","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EFeaturing Aniello De Santo, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Utah.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Ch2\u003EAbstract\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/h2\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAmbiguity is everywhere in human languages. Consider, for example, a sentence like \u201cI saw the son of the doctor [who was playing the piano]\u201d. This sentence is globally ambiguous, as the construction allows for the relative clause (RC) \u201c[who was playing the piano]\u201d to modify either the first noun (\u201cson\u201d) or the second (\u201cdoctor\u201d). \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENotably, 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), \u0026nbsp;or show a high attachment preference (HA; RC modifies the first noun; e.g. Spanish, German, Cuetos \u0026amp; Mitchell 1988; Hemforth et al. 2015). Importantly, these patterns do not align neatly with typological categories \u2014 for instance, Romanian speakers reportedly prefer LA despite the structural similarities between Romanian and Spanish (Ehrlich 1999) \u2014 and languages seem to exhibit LA or HA preferences to different degrees (Carreiras \u0026amp; Clifton Jr 1993; Swets et al. 2008; Cotter \u0026amp; 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.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EWhile 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, \u0026nbsp;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.\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EFeaturing Aniello De Santo, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Utah.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Featuring Aniello De Santo, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Utah."}],"uid":"36009","created_gmt":"2026-10-16 15:11:25","changed_gmt":"2026-10-16 15:13:52","author":"cwhittle9","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2026-11-04T14:00:00-05:00","event_time_end":"2026-11-04T15:00:00-05:00","event_time_end_last":"2026-11-04T15:00:00-05:00","gmt_time_start":"2026-11-04 19:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2026-11-04 20:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2026-11-04 20:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"location":"Skiles 314 and Online","extras":[],"related_links":[{"url":"https:\/\/gatech.zoom.us\/j\/94458780799?pwd=aaTnD5aBWQ670c0dyZHtotSX1231pG.1","title":"Join Online"},{"url":"https:\/\/aniellodesanto.github.io\/","title":"Aniello De Santo Website"}],"groups":[{"id":"1281","name":"Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts"},{"id":"1284","name":"School of Modern Languages"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EHongchen Wu\u003Cbr\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:hwu480@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ehwu480@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}