Evidence for Early Closure Attachment on First Pass Reading Times in French

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in French with sentences of the form “N V N1of-N2 who …” Example: “A journalist approached the barrister (male) of the singer (female) who seemed more confident (masculine or feminine gender) than (s)he ought to be.” The results are consistent with those of Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). French readers, like Spanish readers, prefer early closure (and are garden-pathed when the sentence turns out to be a late-closure attachment). This effect was exhibited by first-pass reading times that are usually assumed to reflect initial syntactic commitments. These results are discussed in relation to Frazier and Clifton's recent proposals concerning attachment mechanisms in the case of “non-primary” relationships such as relative clauses, and more precisely the notion that early-closure attachments observed in cross-linguistic studies are determined by relatively late processes.