PROBABILISTIC CONSTRAINTS AND SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION

被引:247
作者
MACDONALD, MC
机构
[1] Departments of Linguistics and Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California
来源
LANGUAGE AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES | 1994年 / 9卷 / 02期
基金
美国国家科学基金会;
关键词
D O I
10.1080/01690969408402115
中图分类号
H0 [语言学];
学科分类号
030303 ; 0501 ; 050102 ;
摘要
Natural languages contain probabilistic constraints that influence the resolution of ambiguities. Current models of sentence processing agree that probabilistic constraints affect syntactic ambiguity resolution, but there has been little investigation of the constraints themselves-what they are, how they differ in their effects on processing, and how they interact with one another. Three different types of probabilistic constraints were investigated: ''pre-ambiguity'' plausibility information, information about verb argument structure frequencies, and ''post-ambiguity'' constraints that arrive after the introduction of the ambiguity but prior to its disambiguation. Reading times for syntactically ambiguous sentences were compared to reading times for unambiguous controls in three self-paced reading experiments. All three kinds of constraints were found to be helpful, and when several constraints converged, ambiguity resolution was facilitated compared to when constraints conflicted. The importance of these constraint interactions for ambiguity resolution models is discussed.
引用
收藏
页码:157 / 201
页数:45
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