title: Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints.
abstract: Different theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution argue for different sources of information determining initial parsing decisions (e.g., structurally defined parsing principles, lexically specific biases, or referential pragmatics). However, a "constraint-based" approach to syntactic ambiguity resolution proposes that both lexically specific biases and referential pragmatics are used in parallel by the comprehender. Analyses of text corpora, sentence fragment completions, and self-paced reading experiments were conducted to demonstrate that both local information (lexically specific biases) and contextual information (referential presupposition) contribute to the on-line resolution of prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. There does not appear to be a role for purely structurally defined parsing principles (i.e., minimal attachment). Present and previous evidence is consistent with a developing framework in which multiple constraints (bottom-up and top-down) interact immediately to determine initial syntactic commitments.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Spivey-Knowlton
authors.forename: J C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Sedivy
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D011340:Problem Solving; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics