Competition Between Primary and Non-Primary Relations During Sentence Comprehension

The four eye-tracking experiments reported examined the way in which Adjunct Predicates (APs) located at the beginning of French sentences of the type Tired (feminine/masculine) of calling the woman (s/he) left the room are interpreted and interact with syntactic parsing strategies. The results suggest that the first NP (the woman) was initially interpreted as the potential AP gender controller. Moreover, in the case of gender agreement (the woman is the one who is tired) the syntactic status of the first NP (either the object of the preceding verb or the subject of the main verb) apparently remained ambiguous until the main verb was reached. The implications of these results for Frazier and Clifton's (1996) Construal Theory are discussed.