The role of specific information about the verb in parsing sentences with local structural ambiguity

• Published in: Journal of memory and language Vol. 24; no. 5; pp. 542 - 559
• Main Authors: Mitchell, D.C, Holmes, V.M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.10.1985; Elsevier; Academic Press
• Subjects: Ambiguity; Biological and medical sciences; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Grammatical Analysis; Language; Production and perception of written language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading Processes; Sentence; Syntax; Verbal; Human; Word; Segmentation; Generative grammar; Grammatical inference; Guidance; Lexicons; Reading; Language; Semantics; Sentence comprehension; Sentence; Ambiguity; Lexical analysis
• ISSN: 0749-596X; 1096-0821
• DOI: 10.1016/0749-596X(85)90045-2

Three experiments were conducted to determine whether individual words can influence the course of parsing in an on-line subject-paced reading task. The materials were sentences with local structural ambiguities. The results of Experiment I showed that when one verb in a sentence was replaced by another, this produced a garden-path effect. This suggests that the identity of the verb may have influenced the choice of structure for the ambiguous phrase. Experiments II and III were conducted to rule out alternative explanations based on possible segmentation artifacts and on changes in the overall plausibility of the sentences. The evidence supported the initial interpretation in terms of a general and robust parsing bias. The findings throw light on the kinds of information that the parser would have to act on when processing the verb.