The actress was not on the balcony: testing the Pseudorelative-First Hypothesis in Spanish

Strategies for attachment resolution in double-antecedent relative clauses have been widely studied since the late 1980s, when a seminal study by Cuetos and Michell revealed that the principles of Late Closure and Minimal Attachment were met in some languages but not in others. These principles pred...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Marta De Pedis, Adam Zawiszewski, Itziar Laka
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2025-03-01
Series:Frontiers in Psychology
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1546432/full
Description
Summary:Strategies for attachment resolution in double-antecedent relative clauses have been widely studied since the late 1980s, when a seminal study by Cuetos and Michell revealed that the principles of Late Closure and Minimal Attachment were met in some languages but not in others. These principles predicted a universal preference for low attachment whereas several studies obtained a high attachment preference in Spanish. Since then, high attachment preference has been reported in a variety of languages and with different methods. There have been several attempts at explaining high attachment preference, but none have succeeded. In 2014, the Pseudorelative-First (PR-First) Hypothesis was proposed: it claims that pseudorelative clauses (PRs) are the reason why some languages reveal a preference for high attachment. In this paper, we test the PR-First Hypothesis by means of two self-paced reading experiments in Spanish. Results (reading times and accuracy scores) show an overall preference for HA regardless of PR availability, indicating that the PR-First Hypothesis cannot account for the variation in attachment preferences found in the literature.
ISSN:1664-1078