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Many experiments have studied attraction errors in number agreement (e.g. ‘The key to the cabinets were rusty’). It has been noted that singular heads with plural dependents (attractors) trigger larger attraction effects than plural heads with singular attractors, and that in languages with morphological case, morphologically ambiguous attractors trigger larger effects (accusative plural forms coinciding with nominative plural were compared to unambiguous case forms). In Russian, the nominative plural forms of some nouns coincide not only with their accusative plural forms but also with the genitive singular. In one production and two comprehension experiments, such genitive singular forms were found to trigger larger attraction effects than morphologically unambiguous genitive plural forms. Accusative plural forms coinciding with the nominative plural were shown to be the most effective attractors. These results have implications for different models of attraction and for other discussions in morphology concerning ambiguity processing, different approaches to syncretism and the problem of lexical insertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four eye-tracking experiments examined how violations of the Gricean maxim of quantity affect reading. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that first-pass reading times for size-modified definite nouns ( the small towel ) were longer when the modifier was redundant, as the context contained one rather than two possible referents, whereas first-pass times for bare nouns ( the towel ) were unaffected by whether the context contained multiple referents that resulted in ambiguity. Experiment 3 showed that unlike redundant size modifiers, redundant color modifiers did not increase first-pass times. Experiment 4 confirmed this finding, demonstrating that the effect of redundancy was dependent on the meaning of the modifier. We propose that initial referential processing is led by the lexico-semantic representation of the referring expression rather than Gricean expectations about optimal informativeness: Redundancy of a size-modifier immediately disrupts comprehension because the processor fails to activate the referential contrast implied by the meaning of the modifier, whereas referential ambiguity has no immediate effect, as it allows the activation of at least one semantically-compatible referent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children have considerable difficulty producing informative and unambiguous referring expressions, a fact that still lacks a full explanation. Potential insight can come from psycholinguistic models of ambiguity avoidance in adults, which suggest that, before describing any scene, speakers pro-actively monitor for some — but not all — types of potential ambiguity, and then subsequently monitor whether their just-produced expression provides an ambiguous description. Our experiments used eye tracking to assess the developing roles of these skills in children’s referential communication. Experiment 1 shows that adults’ eye movements can index the processes of both pro-active and self-monitoring. Experiments 2 and 3 show that children (n = 110) typically do not pro-actively monitor for potential ambiguity, although they do show evidence of pro-active monitoring on the occasions when they produce informative expressions. However, we do find evidence that children consistently monitor their own descriptions for ambiguity, even though they rarely correct their utterances. We propose that the process of self-monitoring might act as a learning signal, that guides children as they acquire the ability to monitor pro-actively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human language is massively ambiguous, yet we are generally able to identify the intended meanings of the sentences we hear and read quickly and accurately. How we manage and resolve ambiguity incrementally during real-time language comprehension given our cognitive resources and constraints is a major question in human cognition. Previous research investigating resource constraints on lexical ambiguity resolution has yielded conflicting results. Here we present results from two experiments in which we recorded eye movements to test for evidence of resource constraints during lexical ambiguity resolution. We embedded moderately biased homographs in sentences with neutral prior context and either long or short regions of text before disambiguation to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. The length of intervening material had no effect on ease of disambiguation. Instead, we found only a main effect of meaning at disambiguation, such that disambiguating to the subordinate meaning of the homograph was more difficult—results consistent with the reordered access model and contemporary probabilistic models, but inconsistent with the capacity-constrained model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many word forms map onto multiple meanings (e.g., “ace”). The current experiments explore the extent to which adults reshape the lexical–semantic representations of such words on the basis of experience, to increase the availability of more recently accessed meanings. A naturalistic web-based experiment in which primes were presented within a radio programme (Experiment 1; N = 1800) and a lab-based experiment (Experiment 2) show that when listeners have encountered one or two disambiguated instances of an ambiguous word, they then retrieve this primed meaning more often (compared with an unprimed control condition). This word-meaning priming lasts up to 40 min after exposure, but decays very rapidly during this interval. Experiments 3 and 4 explore longer-term word-meaning priming by measuring the impact of more extended, naturalistic encounters with ambiguous words: recreational rowers ( N = 213) retrieved rowing-related meanings for words (e.g., “feather”) more often if they had rowed that day, despite a median delay of 8 hours. The rate of rowing-related interpretations also increased with additional years’ rowing experience. Taken together these experiments show that individuals’ overall meaning preferences reflect experience across a wide range of timescales from minutes to years. In addition, priming was not reduced by a change in speaker identity (Experiment 1), suggesting that the phenomenon occurs at a relatively abstract lexical–semantic level. The impact of experience was reduced for older adults (Experiments 1, 3, 4) suggesting that the lexical–semantic representations of younger listeners may be more malleable to current linguistic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments used event-related potentials to examine the processing consequences of gender-mismatching pronouns (e.g., “The aunt found out that he had won the lottery”), which have been shown to elicit P600 effects when judged as syntactically anomalous ( Osterhout & Mobley, 1995 ). In each experiment, mismatching pronouns elicited a sustained, frontal negative shift (Nref) compared to matching pronouns: when participants were instructed to posit a new referent for mismatching pronouns (Experiment 1), and without this instruction (Experiments 2 and 3). In Experiments 1 and 2, the observed Nref was robust only in individuals with higher reading span scores. In Experiment 1, participants with lower reading span showed P600 effects instead, consistent with an attempt at coreferential interpretation despite gender mismatch. The results from the experiments combined suggest that, in absence of an acceptability judgment task, people are more likely to interpret mismatching pronouns as referring to an unknown, unheralded antecedent than as a grammatically anomalous anaphor for a given antecedent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A normed measure of the ambiguity of words' emotional valence has been developed. • With that measure, emotional ambiguity displays characteristic empirical effects. • We developed a similar normed measure of the ambiguity of other semantic attributes. • The ambiguities of other attributes displayed the same empirical effects as emotional ambiguity. • People process the ambiguity as well as the intensity of semantic attributes. The emotional ambiguity hypothesis posits that as items are encoded, people process the ambiguity as well as the intensity of their valence. The hypothesis predicts three signature effects, all of which have been reported: ambiguity-driven declines in valence-arousal correlations, a quadratic law relating perceived valence to valence ambiguity, and improvements in episodic memory as a function of increases in valence ambiguity. After reviewing evidence on these effects, we evaluated fuzzy-trace theory's proposal that the ambiguity hypothesis should apply to a broad range of semantic attributes other than valence (e.g., categorization, concreteness, meaningfulness). According to that proposal, all three effects should be observed for other attributes. They are. In Experiment 1, ambiguity-driven reductions in attribute correlations were identified for seven other attributes. In Experiment 2, 16 other attributes obeyed the quadratic law. In Experiments 3–5, three other attributes displayed ambiguity-driven improvements in recall. It appears that people process the ambiguity as well as the intensity of many semantic attributes, and hence, the memory effects of such attributes can be due to either or both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In three priming experiments, we investigated whether the meanings of ambiguous morphemes were activated during word recognition. Using a meaning generation task, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the dominant meaning of individually presented ambiguous morphemes was reported more often than did other less frequent meanings. Also, participants tended to produce responses that were consistent with the morphemic meaning of the subliminally presented prime words. Experiment 2 employed a masked priming lexical decision task (prime display duration=40ms) and showed that the recognition of targets which took the dominant meaning of ambiguous morphemes was facilitated by all morpheme-sharing primes, regardless of their intended interpretation. In contrast, morphological priming for subordinate targets was observed only in the subordinate priming condition. Using an unmasked priming task (prime display duration=100ms). Experiment 3 revealed that lexical decision responses were facilitated only when the morphemic interpretations in primes and targets were matched. These data indicate that the different meanings of an ambiguous morpheme are activated early during word recognition and that it takes time to select the appropriate morphemic interpretation. The results are discussed with reference to a modified lemma model of word recognition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Comprehension of semantically ambiguous words (e.g., “bark”) is strongly influenced by the relative frequencies of their meanings, such that listeners are biased towards retrieving the most frequent meaning. These biases are often assumed to reflect a highly stable property of an individual’s long-term lexical–semantic representations. We present three experiments that support an alternative view and suggest that these biases reflect a highly flexible aspect of lexical representations. We show that a single encounter with an ambiguous word in context is sufficient to bias a listener’s interpretation of that word after an average delay of more than 20min. This word-meaning priming effect is not affected by changes to the speakers’ identity between initial exposure and later testing, and is longer-lasting than purely semantic priming without the presence of the ambiguous word. These results provide evidence for a top-down influence of sentential context in retuning abstract lexical/semantic representations, and illustrate how semantic retuning can improve the comprehension of ambiguous words in speech. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Words like church are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another view, readers retrieve one or more specific senses. In a reading task, context that was neutral or biased towards a particular sense preceded a polysemous word. Disambiguating material consistent with only one sense followed, in a second sentence (Experiment 1) or the same sentence (Experiments 2 and 3). Reading the disambiguating material was faster when it was consistent with that context, and dominant senses were committed to more strongly than subordinate senses. Critically, following neutral context, the continuation was read more quickly when it selected the dominant sense, and the degree of sense dominance partially explained the reading time advantage. Similarity of the senses also affected reading times. Across experiments, we found that sense selection may not be completed immediately following a polysemous word but is completed at a sentence boundary. Overall, the results suggest that readers select an individual sense when reading a polysemous word, rather than a core meaning. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Two event-related potential experiments investigated the effects of syntactic and semantic context information on the processing of noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park). Experiment 1 embedded NV-homographs and matched unambiguous words in contexts that provided only syntactic cues or both syntactic and semantic constraints. Replicating prior work, when only syntactic information was available NV-homographs elicited sustained frontal negativity relative to unambiguous words. Semantic constraints eliminated this frontal ambiguity effect. Semantic constraints also reduced N400 amplitudes, but less so for homographs than unambiguous words. Experiment 2 showed that this reduced N400 facilitation was limited to cases in which the semantic context picks out a non-dominant meaning, likely reflecting the semantic mismatch between the context and residual, automatic activation of the contextually-inappropriate dominant sense. Overall, the findings suggest that ambiguity resolution in context involves the interplay between multiple neural networks, some involving more automatic semantic processing mechanisms and others involving top-down control mechanisms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper investigates how readers process number ambiguous noun phrases in subject position. A speeded-grammaticality judgment experiment and two self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving number ambiguous subjects in German verb-end clauses. Number preferences for individual nouns were estimated by means of two questionnaire studies and a corpus analysis. The data show garden-path effects for locally ambiguous sentences, suggesting that readers resolved the number ambiguity immediately. Substantial correlations between experimental results and results from the norming studies indicate that the choice of either singular or plural is determined by exposure-based lexical preferences. We discuss the implications of our results for the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing, in particular with regard to the costs incurred by revising earlier lexical decisions. In addition, we address two methodological issues: first, the appropriate way to obtain lexical preferences, and second, the measurement of garden-path effects in verb-end sentences disambiguated by the final word. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Spoken word recognition shows gradient sensitivity to within-category voice onset time (VOT), as predicted by several current models of spoken word recognition, including TRACE (McClelland, J., & Elman, J. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1–86). It remains unclear, however, whether this sensitivity is short-lived or whether it persists over multiple syllables. VOT continua were synthesized for pairs of words like barricade and parakeet, which differ in the voicing of their initial phoneme, but otherwise overlap for at least four phonemes, creating an opportunity for “lexical garden-paths” when listeners encounter the phonemic information consistent with only one member of the pair. Simulations established that phoneme-level inhibition in TRACE eliminates sensitivity to VOT too rapidly to influence recovery. However, in two Visual World experiments, look-contingent and response-contingent analyses demonstrated effects of word initial VOT on lexical garden-path recovery. These results are inconsistent with inhibition at the phoneme level and support models of spoken word recognition in which sub-phonetic detail is preserved throughout the processing system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: When people read temporarily ambiguous sentences, there is often an increased prevalence of regressive eye-movements launched from the word that resolves the ambiguity. Traditionally, such regressions have been interpreted at least in part as reflecting readers’ efforts to re-read and reconfigure earlier material, as exemplified by the Selective Reanalysis hypothesis [Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178–210]. Within such frameworks it is assumed that the selection of saccadic landing-sites is linguistically supervised. As an alternative to this proposal, we consider the possibility (dubbed the Time Out hypothesis) that regression control is partly decoupled from linguistic operations and that landing-sites are instead selected on the basis of low-level spatial properties such as their proximity to the point from which the regressive saccade was launched. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to compare the explanatory potential of these two accounts. Experiment 1 manipulated the formatting of linguistically identical sentences and showed, contrary to purely linguistic supervision, that the landing site of the first regression from a critical word was reliably influenced by the physical layout of the text. Experiment 2 used a fixed physical format but manipulated the position in the display at which reanalysis-relevant material was located. Here the results showed a highly reliable linguistic influence on the overall distribution of regression landing sites (though with few effects being apparent on the very first regression). These results are interpreted as reflecting mutually exclusive forms of regression control with fixation sequences being influenced both by spatially constrained, partially decoupled supervision systems as well as by some kind of linguistic guidance. The findings are discussed in relation to existing computational models of eye-movements in reading. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines the hypothesis that grammatical function reanalyses in simple sentences should not be treated as phrase structure revisions, but rather as increased costs in “linking” an argument from a syntactic to a semantic representation. To this end, we investigated whether subject–object reanalyses in German verb-final sentences can be associated with an electrophysiological processing signature that is distinct from the response typically engendered by structure-affecting reanalyses (the P600). We hypothesized that the previously observed heterogeneous ERP component pattern for subject-object reanalyses in German might be due to task- or strategy-related interactions between the critical processing mechanisms and the experimental environment. In order to minimize specific task influences, Experiment 1 therefore embedded subject–object ambiguities into short stories (presented auditorily). Constructions with dative and accusative objects both showed a biphasic N400-late positivity pattern for disambiguation towards an object-initial structure. These results thus contrast with previous findings, in showing that there is no principled difference in the component pattern for the two types of structures. This conclusion was confirmed by the results of Experiment 2, which presented the identical accusative sentences from Experiment 1 in isolation using two different tasks (comprehension vs. acceptability) and again revealed N400-late positivity responses. From the overall data pattern, we conclude that the N400 is a robust correlate of grammatical function reanalysis that occurs independently of any lexical factors and, consequently, that grammatical function reanalysis is functionally distinct from phrase structure reanalysis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A reduced relative—main clause ambiguity occurs in sentences that begin with reduced relative clauses, as in The hangman executed by the government was convicted of treason. This ambiguity has often been the focus of research designed to investigate the processes by which syntactic structures are built during sentence comprehension. Reading time differences between more difficult and less difficult reduced relative sentences (e.g., The hangman executed by the government was convicted of treason vs. The martyr executed by the government was convicted of treason) have been interpreted as reflecting syntactic disambiguation processes. In this article, we point out that there exists a possible alternative interpretation of the differences, namely, that reading times are longer for the more difficult sentences because the information in their relative clauses mismatches a reader’s general knowledge of how events typically occur in the world or how they are typically referenced in discourse. Under this interpretation, the differences in reading times do not have their bases in disambiguation processing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The experimental studies presented in this paper exploit agreement attraction in order to examine the mechanisms underlying the production of subject–verb agreement in Slovak. Our experiments verify that the processes which specify the gender feature on past tense verbs are subject to interference from local nouns, and that the likelihood of interference from the local noun depends on the relative markedness of the subject phrase’s head and local noun gender. The results suggest that, unlike the asymmetries observed with the two-term opposition between singular and plural, the markedness asymmetries observed with the three Slovak genders are not explicable solely in terms of the under-specification (or default status) of the unmarked value. The results also indicate that the likelihood of attraction depends on the case form of the head and local noun. The effects relating to gender markedness and to grammatical case provide evidence that producing subject–verb agreement requires the retrieval of an agreement source from content-addressable working memory. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: According to parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of visual word recognition, the speed of semantic coding is modulated by the nature of the orthographic-to-semantic mappings. Consistent with this idea, an ambiguity disadvantage and a relatedness-of-meaning (ROM) advantage have been reported in some word recognition tasks in which semantic processing is presumed to be required for responding. To further evaluate this idea, we examined ambiguity and ROM effects in lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. In the lexical decision task, there was an ambiguity advantage but no ROM effect. In the semantic categorization tasks, we used various semantic categories and found a processing time disadvantage for ambiguous words with less related meanings when the decisions were relatively difficult, but observed no effect when the decisions were easier. These results suggest that both the ambiguity disadvantage and the ROM advantage in the semantic categorization tasks are due to decision-making, rather than semantic-coding, processes. The implications of these results for issues concerning the nature of semantic coding and semantic representations are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Using evidence from eye-tracking studies, have argued against currently implemented constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution. The case against these competition models is based on a mismatch between reported patterns of reading data and the putative predictions of the models. Using a series of detailed simulations, we show that there are marked differences between the actual and claimed predictions of one of the main exemplar models. As a consequence, we argue that the existing data remain entirely compatible with at least one current constraint-based account. We end with a brief discussion of the implications for a range of other implemented models. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: An important psycholinguistic discussion centers on the question of whether bilinguals use the same representations and mechanisms for the languages they speak (the interactive view) or whether the representations and mechanisms for each language are kept strictly separated (the modular view). Empirical investigations of this question have focused on the lexical level of language processing, either by looking at activation of word-level information or at activation of syntactic information that is closely tied to lexical entries. In three experiments, we looked at the priming of syntactic information that is unrelated to lexical entries, namely relative clause attachments. For example, in a sentence like “Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony” the relative clause can be attached to two possible noun phrases, “the servant” or “the actress.” This type of attachment is syntactic because it cannot be represented by lexical subcategorization frames (relative clauses are modifiers) or by lexically related combinatorial nodes (both interpretations have the same NP+RC structure). We found that relative clause attachments can be primed from Dutch to English in Dutch–English bilinguals. This is the first demonstration of cross-linguistic priming of syntactic information that is not directly linked to lexical entries and favors the interactive view of bilingual syntactic processing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This study inspected the processes of verifying the current discourse constituent against the referents that it passively cues during reading. It seemed plausible that, after understanding The customer ate pancakes, the processes of fully understanding The waiter implied that the customer ate eggs might resemble those of intentionally verifying The customer ate eggs (“false”). Therefore, one working hypothesis was that existing analyses of intentional sentence verification might bear on tacit verification during reading. Second, discourse pragmatics are likely to influence and regulate those verification processes. To explore this analysis, experiments implemented a reading time analogue of familiar sentence verification tasks. Story target sentences varied in their truth and use of negation with reference to antecedent text. Experiment 1 suggested that sentence reading time varies systematically with truth and negation, a result that was proposed to reflect the joint impact of discourse pragmatics and of verification operations akin to intentional ones. Experiment 2 denied that the latter results were appreciably affected by violations of the pragmatics of negation. Experiment 3 provided evidence that, when readers adopt an intentional verification strategy, reading times resemble those of intentional sentence verification. These results were interpreted to support the central assumptions of the study. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Gricean Maxim of Quantity is believed to govern linguistic performance. Speakers are assumed to provide as much information as required for referent identification and no more, and listeners are believed to expect unambiguous but concise descriptions. In three experiments we examined the extent to which naïve participants are sensitive to the Maxim of Quantity. The first was a production experiment which demonstrated that speakers over-describe almost one-third of the time. The second experiment showed that listeners do not judge over-descriptions to be any worse than concise expressions. The third experiment used the Visual World Paradigm to assess listeners’ moment-by-moment interpretations of over-described utterances. This last experiment revealed that over-descriptions trigger eye movements that can be interpreted as indicating confusion. The results provide support for the use of a simple heuristic such as Minimal Attachment or Argument Saturation to create an initial parse. We conclude that people are only moderately Gricean. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top–down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom–up statistical information) in order to resolve ambiguities in the lexical categories of words. Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted involving the ambiguous word “that” in different syntactic environments in order to test these and other hypotheses. The data support the top–down/bottom–up approach in which the relative frequencies of lexical entries for a word are tabulated independent of context. Data from other experiments from the literature are discussed with respect to the model proposed here. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: proposed that using only and prior referential context to specify contrastive focus can guide the parsing of relative clause ambiguities. We report two studies investigating this hypothesis, using sentences that either temporarily allowed or disallowed a transitive main clause interpretation. Sentence completions demonstrated that only and interrogative contexts jointly influenced the frequency of relative clause completions to ambiguous fragments. Eye-tracking demonstrated that conjoint effects of only and context influenced initial parsing decisions only when the active transitive analysis was unavailable. The results are consistent with previous observations that the influence of contrastive focus on sentence processing depends on which syntactic analyses are available to the parser (). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We report three eye-movement experiments that investigated whether alternative syntactic analyses compete during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Previous research (Traxler. Pickering, & Clifton, 1998: Van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2001) has shown that globally ambiguous sentences are easier to process than disambiguated sentences, suggesting that competition does not explain processing difficulty. However, the disambiguation in these studies was delayed relative to the initial point of ambiguity, so they do not rule out models which claim that competition is very short-lasting. The current experiments show that globally ambiguous sentences are easier to process than disambiguated sentences even when the disambiguation is immediate. Furthermore, globally ambiguous sentences are no harder to process than syntactically unambiguous sentences. We argue that the results are inconsistent with currently implemented constraint-based competition models, and support variable-choice reanalysis models such as the unrestricted race model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psycholinguistic investigations of reanalysis phenomena have typically focused on revisions of phrase structure. Here, we identify a further subcomponent of syntactic reanalysis, namely the revision of case marking. This aspect of reanalysis was isolated by examining German subject-object ambiguities that require a revision towards a dative-initial order. Since dative-initial orders are potentially unmarked, no phrase structure corrections are required, but the original, preference-based nominative assignment must be revised. Experiment 1, an ERP study, revealed an N400 component for reanalysis of case marking, which contrasted with a P600 component for phrase structure revisions. The 're-analysis N400' was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that direct lexical support for a dative-initial order leads to a reduction of the effect. Finally, in Experiment 3, direct time course measures provided by the speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure supported the case reanalysis account by showing that conditions hypothesized to involve case reanalysis (dative-initial structures) require longer computation times than their nominative-initial counterparts. Lexeme-specific support for the dative-initial reading, however, does not lead to a faster computation of the target structure, but rather increases the likelihood that the correct interpretation will be computed. We interpret these findings as evidence for the general availability of an unmarked dative-nominative word order in German, the accessibility of which may be increased by lexical information. Moreover, the data show that syntactic reanalysis is not a homogeneous process, but may rather be subdivided along several dimensions that interact in determining overall garden path strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like "Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother," alternate orders would avoid the temporary PPattachment ambiguity ("Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary," or "Jane showed to her mother the letter to Mary"). A preference judgment experiment confirmed that comprehenders prefer the latter orders for dative utterances when the former order would have contained an ambiguity. Nevertheless, speakers in two on-line production experiments showed no evidence of an ambiguity avoidance strategy. In fact, they were slightly more likely to use the former order when it was ambiguous than when it was not. Speakers' failure to disambiguate with ordering cannot be explained by the use of other ambiguity mechanisms, like prosody. A prosodic analysis of the responses in Experiment 3 showed that while speakers generally produced prosodic patterns that were consistent with the syntactic structure, these patterns would not strongly disambiguate the PP-attachment ambiguity. We suggest that speakers do not consistently disambiguate local PP-attachment ambiguities of this type, and in particular do not use constituent ordering for this purpose. Instead, constituent ordering is driven by factors like syntactic weight and lexical bias, which may be internal to the production system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically compatible with only a proper subpart of the input are sometimes constructed, at least temporarily. Three self-paced reading experiments probed for interference from such locally coherent structures. The first tested for a distracting effect of irrelevant Subject–Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase–Verb Phrase sequences (e.g., The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee) on reading times. The second addressed the question of whether the interference effects can be treated as lexical interference, instead of involving the formation of locally coherent syntactic structures. The third replicated the reading time effects of the first two experiments with grammaticality judgments. We evaluate the dynamical account, comparing it to other approaches that also predict effects of local coherence, and arguing against accounts which rule out the formation of merely locally coherent structures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

showed that on-line disambiguation preferences do not always mirror corpus frequencies. When presented with a syntactic ambiguity involving the conjunction of a noun phrase to three possible attachment sites, participants were faster to read attachments to the first site than attachments to the second one, although the latter were shown to be more frequent in text corpora. In the present study, we investigated whether a particular feature in their items—disambiguation using the pronoun ‘one’—could account for this discrepancy. The results of a corpus analysis and two on-line reading experiments showed that the presence of this pronoun is indeed responsible for the high attachment preference in the conjunction ambiguity. We conclude that for this syntactic ambiguity there is no discrepancy between on-line preferences and corpus frequencies. Consequently, there is no need to assume different processes underlying sentence comprehension and sentence production on the basis of the noun phrase conjunction ambiguity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Two eye-movement experiments examined the processing of sentences containing reduced relative constructions. In the first experiment, animacy of the sentential subject, structural ambiguity, and parafoveal preview of syntactically disambiguating material were manipulated. Evidence of disruption was found in temporarily ambiguous sentences, regardless of animacy or preview. In the second experiment, readers with high versus low verbal working memory capacity read the sentences from Experiment 1. High and low-span readers exhibited very similar patterns of processing. As in the first experiment, evidence for disruption was found in temporarily ambiguous sentences whether the sentential subject was animate or inanimate. Sentences with animate subjects were hard to interpret, and relatively late measures of processing indicated that an animate subject made ambiguity especially hard to overcome. We interpret the findings as being consistent with serial, depth-first models of parsing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The research investigated how comprehenders use structural information during co-reference resolution of the pronouns her, him, and his. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing the pronoun her in object position, functioning as SPEC or NP and preceded by one of three types of NPs in subject position (e.g., “Mary/Mark/They saw her friend/yesterday…”). In Experiment 2, additional participants read similar sentences, containing the unambiguous pronouns him or his. The results of both experiments showed that the type of NP occurring in subject position influenced processing on both SPEC and NP pronouns. These results were inconsistent with claims that comprehenders consider only those antecedents that are structurally available as antecedents, following Binding Theory (; ). In Experiment 3, subject type did not influence processing of NP pronouns when the context contained a highly salient, structurally available antecedent. Implications for theories of referential processing are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In three experiments, a referential communication task was used to determine the conditions under which speakers produce and listeners use prosodic cues to distinguish alternative meanings of a syntactically ambiguous phrase. Analyses of the actions and utterances from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that Speakers chose to produce effective prosodic cues to disambiguation only when the referential scene provided support for both interpretations of the phrase. In Experiment 3, on-line measures of parsing commitments were obtained by recording the Listener’s eye movements to objects as the Speaker gave the instructions. Results supported the previous experiments but also showed that the Speaker’s prosody affected the Listener’s interpretation prior to the onset of the ambiguous phrase, thus demonstrating that prosodic cues not only influence initial parsing but can also be used to predict material which has yet to be spoken. The findings suggest that informative prosodic cues depend upon speakers’ knowledge of the situation: speakers provide prosodic cues when needed; listeners use these prosodic cues when present. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Examines the psychological factors that influence human language processors' preference for reanalysis during language comprehension using three experiments on complement-clause ambiguities. Revision-as-last-resort and revision-irrelevant hypotheses; Avoidance of reanalysis; Trimmed residual reading times with untrimmed raw reading times.

Explores the processing of ambiguous sentences. Adjunct attachments of prosodic boundaries; Comparison of attachment between clausal and nonclausal adjuncts; Importance of acoustic magnitude of local boundary and distant boundary.

Assesses the impact of thematic fit and discourse context on the syntactic ambiguity resolution. Observation on the garden path effects for reduction of target sentences; Differentiation of garden path model and constraint satisfaction model; Presentation on the focused comprehension of sentences.

• Recent experience with homonyms primes their interpretation tens of minutes later. • Priming occurs from sentences in which prior context guides disambiguation. • Priming can occur for sentences in which ambiguous words require reinterpretation. • "Good enough" listening tasks reduce priming if sentences require reinterpretation. • Findings reveal learning mechanisms by which lexical-semantic knowledge is updated. A single encounter with an ambiguous word (e.g. bark, ball) in the context of a less-frequent meaning (e.g. "Sally worried about how crowded the ball would be.") can shift the later interpretation of the word toward the same subordinate meaning. This lexical-semantic retuning functions to improve future comprehension of ambiguous words. The present paper investigates the relationship between this form of learning and the specific processes that occur during sentence comprehension. One possibility is that lexical-semantic retuning occurs immediately upon hearing the ambiguous word, during initial meaning activation and selection, so priming should be strongest when the disambiguating context is provided before the ambiguous word (prior disambiguation). Alternatively, priming may relate to the degree of reinterpretation needed, which would predict maximal learning when the word is initially misunderstood because the critical context is given after the word (subsequent disambiguation, e.g. "Sally worried that the ball would be too crowded."). In four experiments, adults listened to prior and subsequent disambiguation sentences, and were later tested on their interpretations of primed and unprimed ambiguous words. The results showed that lexical-semantic retuning can occur for both sentence types. Importantly, however, the emergence of priming for subsequent disambiguation sentences was sensitive to the prime conditions: when the task could potentially be performed without needing to re-analyse the ambiguity, then no significant priming was observed. This is consistent with the 'good enough' view of language processing which states that representations can remain as (im)precise as mandated by the situation, and that lexical-semantic retuning operates on the output of good-enough interpretation. More generally, our findings suggest that lexical-semantic retuning is driven by participants' final interpretation of the word meanings during the prime encounter, regardless of initial meaning activation or misinterpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the resolution of temporary ambiguities in prepositional phrase attachment in English verb-noun-phrase-prepositional-phrase sequences. Utilization of syntactic argumenthood diagnostics; Maximization of argument relations in initial comprehension of the target ambiguity; Evaluation of recency-based and lexical-frequency treatment.

Investigates ambiguity resolution in sentences containing adjunct modifiers. Analysis of readers' response to sentences that began with a noun phrase complex containing two nouns and a preposition; Research on modifiers following complex noun phrases; Different accounts of human sentence processing.

Studies ambiguous phoneme which is said to involve a prelexical process and autonomous models, which have no top-down processing. Sensitivity of autonomous models to the transitional probabilities between speech sounds; Persons who participated in the study; Details on the experiments which were carried out; Results of the experiments.

Presents a study which examined the time-course with which readers use event-specific world knowledge (thematic fit) to resolve structural ambiguity. Details on the experiment conducted; Information on the constraint-based and two-stage models implemented in this study; Methodology used in study; How the results of this study were simulated.

• Lingering misinterpretation and good enough processing have been widely examined. • Previous studies restricted to syntactic ambiguity (As Sue dressed the baby played). • We examined lingering misinterpretation of filler-gap dependencies. • We compared native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers in five experiments. • Results show good enough processing is a general property of L1 and L2 comprehension. Research on temporarily ambiguous "garden-path" sentences (e.g., After Mary dressed the baby laughed) has shown that initially assigned misinterpretations linger after reanalysis of the temporarily ambiguous phrase in both native (L1) and non-native (L2) readers. L2 speakers have particular difficulty with reanalysis, but the source of this L1/L2 difference is debated. Furthermore, how lingering misinterpretation may influence other aspects of language processing has not been systematically examined. We report three offline and two online experiments investigating reanalysis and misinterpretation of filler-gap dependences (e.g., Elisa noticed the truck which the policeman watched the car from). Our results showed that L1 and L2 speakers are prone to lingering misinterpretation during dependency resolution. L1/L2 differences were observed such that L2 speakers had increased difficulty reanalysing some filler-gap dependencies, however this was dependent on how the dependency was disambiguated. These results are compatible with the "good-enough" approach to language processing, and suggest that L1/L2 differences are more likely when reanalysis is particularly difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]