Investigating Animacy Effects on Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Self-paced Reading

This study investigates the role of animacy in guiding prepositional phrase (PP) attachment ambiguity resolution. We conducted a self-paced reading experiment, testing sentences like the teacher recorded a student/classroom with a microphone…, where the Prepositional Phrase is ambiguous between a noun-modifier and a verb-modifier. While previous studies have demonstrated a dominant preference for the structurally simpler verb-modifier analysis (Minimal Attachment; Frazier and Rayner 1982), subsequent research has argued that attachment decisions depend on a range of syntactic and semantic factors such as the argument status of the PP (Schütze 1995). We manipulated the animacy of the direct object preceding the PP to explore its effect on PP attachment ambiguity resolution. Upon disambiguation, reading times revealed equivalent processing costs for both animate and inanimate noun conditions. This indicates that readers first assigned the PP with a microphone to the verb and then performed the noun-modifier reanalysis, regardless of the animacy of the object noun. Our findings are consistent with the theory that Minimal Attachment serves as a default syntactic processing strategy (Frazier 1979). These results further indicate that the role of animacy in guiding ambiguity resolution, as observed in previous studies (e.g., Trueswell et al. 1994), may be structurally limited. Specifically, animacy appears to exert strong influences in core-argument structures, where it interacts directly with other strong syntactic-thematic constraints, such as thematic role assignment. However, this animacy influence does not extend to ambiguity resolution involving non-argument structures such as PP-attachment ambiguities.