Journal of Psychalinguistic Research, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1997 On the Strength of the Local Attachment Preference Colin Phillips 1,3 and Edward Gibson2 This paper investigates the strength of the local attachment preference in syntactic am- biguity resolution, based on a study of a novel ambiguity for which the predictions of local attachment contrast with the predictions of a wide range of other ambiguity res- olution principles. In sentences of the form ' 'Because Rose praised the recipe I made ..." we show that the ambiguous clause "I made" is preferentially attached as a relative clause under some circumstances, as predicted by local attachment, and pref- erentially attached as a matrix clause under other circumstances. The implications for accounts of locality in parsing are discussed. THE LOCALITY PUZZLE This paper is a progress report on our work which investigates the strength and the generality of the local attachment preference (see Gibson, Pearl- mutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, & Hickok 1996; Phillips 1995, 1996). We use this term to refer in a theory neutral way to whatever underlies the inter- This is a revised version of a talk presented at the Ninth Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, New York. We are grateflil to the audience for their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Neal Pearimutter, Carson ScMitze, San Tunstall, Andrea Zukowski, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable assistance and suggestions with this paper. Needless to say, all the remaining errors are our own. The first author's work on this paper was supported in part by the NSF-sponsored RTG grant DIR9113607 awarded to MIT. 1 University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716. 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. 3 Address all correspondence to Colin Phillips, Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware, 46 E. Delaware Avenue, Newark, Delaware 19716. 323 0090-6905/97/0500-0323SJ2.50/0 © 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation