Fraga Isabel, Piñeiro Ana, Acuña-Fariña Carlos, Redondo Jaime, García-Orza Javier
Cognitive Processes & Behaviour Research Group, Department of Basic Psychology, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2012;65(9):1740-59. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2012.662989. Epub 2012 Apr 18.
We report three sentence completion experiments in which we manipulate the emotional dimension of the nouns in a complex noun phrase (NP) that precedes a relative clause (RC), as in the classic ambiguity in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. The aim was to see whether nouns such as orgy or genocide affect the well-established preference of Spanish to adjoin the relative clause high in the tree (to servant instead of actress in the example above). We manipulated the valence and arousal of the lexical entities residing in the NP. Our results indicate that (a) the inclusion of either pleasant or unpleasant words induces changes in the usual NP1 preference found in Spanish; (b) the effects of high-arousal words are especially clear, in that they pull RC adjunction towards the NP where they are located, be it the NP1 or the NP2; and (c) in the context of sentence production, these kinds of words seem intense enough to promote changes in (and even reverse) a solid syntactic bias. We discuss these findings in the light of existing theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution.
我们报告了三个句子完成实验，在这些实验中，我们对关系从句（RC）之前的复杂名词短语（NP）中的名词的情感维度进行了操控，就像“Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony”这个经典歧义句一样。目的是了解诸如“狂欢”或“种族灭绝”之类的名词是否会影响西班牙语中已确立的将关系从句附加到树形结构中较高位置名词（在上述例子中是附加到“仆人”而不是“女演员”）的偏好。我们操控了名词短语中词汇实体的效价和唤醒度。我们的结果表明：（a）无论是包含令人愉快的词还是令人不愉快的词，都会导致西班牙语中常见的NP1偏好发生变化；（b）高唤醒度词的影响尤其明显，因为它们会将关系从句的附加拉向它们所在的名词短语，无论该名词短语是NP1还是NP2；（c）在句子生成的语境中，这类词似乎强烈到足以促使（甚至逆转）一种稳固的句法偏向发生变化。我们根据现有的句法歧义消解理论对这些发现进行了讨论。
