title: The relationship between the frequency and the processing complexity of linguistic structure.
abstract: In this paper the relative frequencies of the possible resolutions of ambiguities involving noun phrase attachment sites are compared to the results of off-line psycholinguistic measurements of syntactic complexity. A lack of correlation between the two is observed. It is therefore argued that the comprehension system is distinct from what is driving the frequencies in the corpora. A production heuristic separate from the comprehension system is proposed to account for the observed frequencies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139, USA.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gibson
authors.forename: C T
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Schütze
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Salomon
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception