@article{article_648403, title={A universal parser or language specific parsing strategies: A study on relative clause attachment preference in Turkish}, journal={RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi}, pages={1–21}, year={2019}, DOI={10.29000/rumelide.648403}, author={Başer, Zeynep}, keywords={İlgi tümcesi bağlama,Türkçe,cümle işlemleme,sözdizimsel hazırlama}, abstract={<p class="zet"> <span lang="EN-US">This study investigated syntactic priming of relative clause (RC) attachment preferences in monolingual Turkish speakers through a series of experiments. Cross-linguistic variations in RC attachment preferences have implied that parsing strategies may not be guided by universal principles but language-specific parameters. Thus, several models put forth their assumptions about the universality of the parser and the underlying mechanisms working in the initial analysis, and the sources of information used in sentence processing.  However, there is not one single model, the predictions of which could account for all the contradictory findings obtained in a myriad of studies using different materials and tasks in different languages. In order to investigate RC attachment preferences further in detail, we conducted two offline (pen-and-paper) tasks and an online (self-paced reading) task. The results showed that monolingual Turkish speakers had no clear attachment preferences on condition that several confounding factors were controlled. More precisely, RC attachment preferences varied depending on the semantic factors (e.g. semantic associations of the host NP with the proximal and the distal predicate), task requirements (e.g. implicit or directed), and techniques (e.g. offline or online) employed in the studies. Nonetheless, the effect of syntactic priming showed that monolingual Turkish speakers distinguished the tree hierarchical configuration of the alternative attachment interpretations. Furthermore, the results suggested that a tendency towards NP1 attachment preference might be attributed to processing difficulty, as a strategy to minimize cognitive demand, arising from conditions such as structural complexity (active vs. passive), task requirements, and research design (offline vs. online, or directed attention vs. implicit processing). <o:p> </o:p> </span> </p>}, publisher={Yakup YILMAZ}