Emotional nouns affect attachment decisions in sentence completion tasks

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Syntactic ambiguity
• Relative clauses
• Sentence completion task
• Emotional words

Acknowledgments

Correspondence should be addressed to Isabel Fraga Carou, Dpto. de Psicoloxía Social, Básica e Metodoloxía, Facultade de Psicoloxía-Universidade de Santiago, Rúa Xosé María Suárez Núñez s/n. Campus sur, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]

This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Grants PSI2009-11748 and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010; CSD2008-00048), and the Regional Government of Galicia (Grant INCITE09204014PR). Ana Piñeiro's work was also funded by a María Barbeito grant issued by the latter government. These grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged. We are grateful to Marc Brysbaert, Don Mitchell, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and suggestions.