Context Type Effects on Attachment Preferences in Disambiguating Turkish Relative Clauses

Abstract

In psycholinguistics, for understanding the processing and comprehension of sentences, relative clause structures are widely studied. Because of their complex structures, relative clauses allow researchers to derive significant findings. The goal of this study is to find out whether context type effects are effective in attachment preferences of Turkish relative clauses constructed using subject participle suffix -(y)An. The current study manipulates situational context (plausibility) and linguistic context to see if attachment preference differs in neutral and context-dependent settings. Turkish native speakers complete an offline questionnaire (N = 100) to assess their preferences for relative clause attachment site and an online self-paced reading task (N = 40) to examine the reaction times in opting for an attachment site. The results reveal that the low attachment preference (NP1) observed in neutral contexts transforms into a high attachment preference (NP2) when the NP2-biased situational context (plausibility) and linguistic context are presented in disambiguating Turkish relative clauses. Both types of contexts have been demonstrated to be effective in reducing reaction times when compared to neutral contexts. The findings further suggest that linguistic context is more effective than situational context.