Abstract

There is cross-linguistic variation in how speakers process ambiguous relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., The girl saw the maid “NP1” of the princess “NP2” who was eating chocolate). English speakers, for example, prefer to interpret the RC (e.g., who was eating chocolate) as modifying the second noun phrase (the princess; low attachment), whereas Spanish and Modern Standard Arabic speakers prefer to interpret the RC as modifying the first noun phrase (the maid; high attachment) (e.g., Bidaoui et al., 2016; Dussias, 2003). The present study examined the RC attachment preference in monolingual speakers and second-language (L2) learners in two offline interpretation experiments. Experiment 1 tested the RC attachment preference in Najdi Arabic monolinguals, revealing a preference for the first noun phrase (i.e., high attachment) in their interpretation of Najdi Arabic ambiguous RCs. These results are consistent with Gibson et al.’s (1996) claim that the principle of Predicate Proximity is more likely to override the u

Key words: Najdi Arabic, relative clause attachment, second language acquisition, shallow structure hypothesis