Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two experiments are reported to test whether the location of prepositional phrase attachment can be influenced by syntactic and contextual factors. The first experiment tested the hypothesis that attachment is delayed until the word after the prepositional phrase. Replicating the results of Taraban and McClelland (1988), this experiment showed that sentence bias rather than syntactic structure determines the ease of processing; attachment effects were observed on the words after the noun filler. In addition, using sentences in which the noun filler consisted of a compound noun, we also found evidence for delayed attachment. Using sentences in which the noun filler was modified by an adjective, we found evidence for early attachment. In the second experiment, we used context paragraphs to induce earlier attachment for the compound noun sentences. When the first noun of the compound was mentioned in the prior discourse, attachment effects were observed on the disambiguating noun filler. When the first noun was not mentioned, attachment effects were observed, as in Experiment 1, on the words after the prepositional phrase. Thus, the study supports the idea of a contextdependent delay strategy for prepositional phrase attachment.