The role of syntactic and semantic information in complex sentence processing and structural ambiguity resolution

Understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying complex sentence processing is one of the main concerns of psycholinguistics. The aim of this study is to investigate the online processing stages of complex noun phrase attachment for relative clauses in Turkish, along with the possible differences in the parsing of ambiguous and unambiguous sentences, and to examine the effects of syntactic and semantic information during the processing of such sentences. Two self-paced reading experiments were conducted in a computer laboratory with 80 university students who are native speakers of Turkish. In the first experiment, sentences with ambiguous relative clauses attached to A1 and A2 were created based on syntactic (binding) cues, while in the second experiment, these sentences were constructed based on semantic (animacy/inanimacy) cues. Participants' reading times, reaction times, preference, and accuracy rates were measured, and descriptive data were initially obtained. Subsequently, the obtained data were analyzed using the Linear Mixed Effects Model to measure the statistical significance of the results. As a result of the first experiment, a significant attachment preference for A2 was observed, while in the second experiment, no preference for A1 or A2 was found. In terms of reading times, it was observed that reading time of A1 was significantly slower, and A1 attached sentences were processed more slowly. Furthermore, the first experiment, which was influenced by syntax, was observed to be read longer compared to the second experiment, which was constructed with semantic information. In terms of processing in interperetaton and post interpretation stages, it was seen that semantic information was determinant and syntactic information was less active during the interpretation stage, while syntactic information was determinant and semantic information had weaker effect in the post-interpretation stage. Within the framework of structural processing models, it was concluded that recency strategy is valid in the processing of ambiguous and unambiguous sentences with relative clauses in Turkish.