修飾語句と言語形式が構造的曖昧文解釈の選好性に及ぼす影響

抄録

Kamide & Mitchell (1997) examined the preference of relative clause attachment ambiguity in Japanese. They observed that low attachment was preferred in the middle of processing, but that high attachment was preferred at the end. Mazuka & Uetsuki (2003) examined NPs with an adjective attachment ambiguity and reported that low attachment was strongly preferred. In the present study I examined the factors that affected these results. I focused on the differences of the stimuli. The effects of both of the types of adjunct (adjective and relative clause) and linguistic form (NP and sentence) on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity were examined. The results indicated that the adjunct type affected the interpretation, and the rate of high attachment in the adjective condition declined only in the NP condition. On the other hand there was no difference for the adjunct type in the sentence conditions. The rate of high attachment in the sentences with an adjective might be increased because of the Predicate Proximity (Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, & Hickok, 1996). These results mean that the type of adjunct and sentence influence the resolution of attachment ambiguity.