The implicit prosody of Jabberwocky and the relative clause attachment riddle

Abstract

This contribution reports on three sentence processing experiments involving structurally ambiguous Jabberwocky strings. The items are complex NPs, in which a relative clause can be attached to either of two nominal heads (NP1-preposition-NP2-RC). The phonological lengths of the heads, as well as that of the relative clause, are manipulated. The results show modest effects on relative clause attachment preferences of this manipulation, thus lending support to Fodor’s (1998, 2002) implicit-prosody hypothesis.