A novel argument for the Universality of Parsing principles.

•Pseudo Relatives (PR) confound previous research on Relative Clause (RC) attachment.•PRs and RCs are string identical but structurally and semantically different.•PR only allowed in some languages (e.g. Spanish, but not English) and structures.•PRs are preferred parse because structurally and interpretively simpler than RCs.•Previous and novel results show significant effect of PR-availability in attachment.