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

De Pedis, Marta; Zawiszewski, Adam; Laka, Itziar

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1546432

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Psychology of Language

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1546432

This article is part of the Research Topic Community Series: Spanish Psycholinguistics - Volume II View all 6 articles

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

Provisionally accepted

Marta De Pedis ^*

Adam Zawiszewski

Itziar Laka

Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Strategies for attachment resolution in double-antecedent relative clauses have been widely studied since Cuetos and Mitchell (1988) revealed that the attachment principles put forth in Frazier (1979) were met in some languages but not in others. Specifically, Frazier (1979) predicted a universal preference for low attachment whereas Cuetos and Mitchell (1988) 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. Grillo and Costa (2014) proposed the Pseudorelative-First (PR-First) Hypothesis, which 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.

Keywords: Pseudorelative-First Hypothesis, Attachment, language processing, syntax, self-paced reading

Received: 16 Dec 2024; Accepted: 11 Feb 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 De Pedis, Zawiszewski and Laka. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Marta De Pedis, Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 01006, Spain

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