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Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26
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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp. 106-126
Abbreviation: KASELL
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2026
Received 26 Nov 2025 Revised 13 Jan 2026 Accepted 13 Jan 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202601.106

Investigating Animacy Effects on Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Self-paced Reading
Ziying Li ; Nayoun Kim
(First author) Ph.D., Department of English Language and Literature Sungkyunkwan University 25-2 Sungkyunkwan-ro, Jongro-gu, Seoul 03063 Seoul, Korea (liziyinggg@gmail.com)
(Corresponding author) Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature Sungkyunkwan University 25-2 Sungkyunkwan-ro, Jongro-gu, Seoul 03063 Seoul, Korea (nayoun@skku.edu)


© 2026 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract

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.

Keywords: real-time sentence processing, animacy, PP-attachment ambiguity, Minimal Attachment
Acknowledgments

This work draws upon the first author’s doctoral dissertation (2026).

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