Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints

Spivey-Knowlton, Michael J.; Sedivy, Julie C.

doi:10.1016/0010-0277(94)00647-4

Cited by 249 publications

(209 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…In constraint-based approaches, syntactic and semantic structures are hypothesized to be continuously activated in parallel at each point in time (cf. Boland, 1997;Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995;MacDonald, 1994;MacRae et al, 1998;Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995;Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995;Trueswell, et al, 1994). Independent of structural ambiguity, semantic and syntactic indeterminacies may emerge from the activation of several alternative structures.…”

Section: The Constraint Based Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses

Gennari

MacDonald

2008

Journal of Memory and Language

190

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This article examined whether semantic indeterminacy plays a role in comprehension of complex structures such as object relative clauses. Study 1 used a gated sentence completion task to assess which alternative interpretations are dominant as the relative clause unfolds; Study 2 compared reading times in object relative clauses containing different animacy configurations to unambiguous passive controls; and Study 3 related completion data and reading data. The results showed that comprehension difficulty was modulated by animacy configuration and voice (active vs. passive). These differences were well correlated with the availability of alternative interpretations as the relative clause unfolds, as revealed by the completion data. In contrast to approaches arguing that comprehension difficulty stems from syntactic complexity, these results suggest that semantic indeterminacy is a major source of comprehension difficulty in object relative clauses. Results are consistent with constraint-based approaches to ambiguity resolution and bring new insights into previously identified sources of difficulty.

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Section: The Constraint Based Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses

Gennari

MacDonald

2008

Journal of Memory and Language

190

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“…Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995) and sometimes speeds up comprehension (e.g. Traxler, Pickering & Clifton, 1998;Van Gompel, Pickering, Liversedge & Traxler, 1999;Van Gompel, Scheepers & Pickering, 1999).…”

Section: Lexical Ambiguitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: a computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar

2000

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We present the design, implementation and simulation results of a psycholinguistic model of human syntactic processing that meets major empirical criteria. The parser operates in conjunction with a lexicalist grammar and is driven by syntactic information associated with heads of phrases. The dynamics of the model are based on competition by lateral inhibition (`competitive inhibition'). Input words activate lexical frames (i.e. elementary trees anchored to input words) in the mental lexicon, and a network of candidate`uni®cation links' is set up between frame nodes. These links represent tentative attachments that are graded rather than all-or-none. Candidate links that, due to grammatical or`treehood' constraints, are incompatible, compete for inclusion in the ®nal syntactic tree by sending each other inhibitory signals that reduce the competitor's attachment strength. The outcome of these local and simultaneous competitions is controlled by dynamic parameters, in particular by the Entry Activation and the Activation Decay rate of syntactic nodes, and by the Strength and Strength Build-up rate of Uni®cation links. In case of a successful parse, a single syntactic tree is returned that covers the whole input string and consists of lexical frames connected by winning Uni®cation links. Simulations are reported of a signi®cant range of psycholinguistic parsing phenomena in both normal and aphasic speakers of English: (i) various effects of linguistic complexity (single versus double, center versus right-hand self-embeddings of relative clauses; the difference between relative clauses with subject and object extraction; the contrast between a complement clause embedded within a relative clause versus a relative clause embedded within a complement clause); (ii) effects of local and global ambiguity, and of word-class and syntactic ambiguity (including recency and length effects); (iii) certain dif®culty-ofreanalysis effects (contrasts between local ambiguities that are easy to resolve versus ones that lead to serious garden-path effects); (iv) effects of agrammatism on parsing performance, www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: vosse@fsw.leidenuniv.nl (T. Vosse); kempen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl (G. Kempen) in particular the performance of various groups of aphasic patients on several sentence types. q

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“…Recency on such a story is thus interestingly different from, for example, Frazier's (1978Frazier's ( , 1987a minimal attachment principle, in that the latter depends on very specific properties of a syntactic representation (i.e., the number of new syntactic nodes required for attachment). Thus while much effort in the constraint-based lexicalist framework has been devoted to replacing structural-complexity metrics like minimal attachment with lexical biases (see, e.g., MacDonald et aI., 1994;Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995;Trueswell et aI., 1994), it might not be surprising that a nonlexical metric like recency is necessary in such models.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because the stimuli in the 2NP and 3NP studies differed in lexical content and were not independently controlled for plausibility, these factors might be able to explain the preferences in both the 2NP and 3NP structures. Related accounts have been proposed for similar ambiguities, involving attachment of a prepositional phrase (PP) (instead of an RC) either to multiple possible NP sites (Gibson & Pearlmutter, 1994;MacDonald & Thornton, 1996) or to a VP or an NP site (Schiitze & Gibson, in press;Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995;Taraban & McClelland, 1988;cf. Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991;Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983).…”

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confidence: 99%

Recency and lexical preferences in Spanish

1999

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One experiment provided evidence in support of Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, and Hickok's (1996) claim that a recency preference applies to Spanish relative clause attachments, contrary to the claim made by Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). Spanish speakers read stimuli involving either two or three potential attachment sites in which the same lexical content of the two-site conditions appeared in a different structural configuration in the three-site conditions. High attachment was easier than low attachment when only two sites were present, but low attachment was preferred over high attachment, which was in turn preferred over middle attachment, when three sites were present. The experiment replicated earlier results and showed that (1) attachment preferences are determined in part by a preference to attach recently/low, and (2) lexical biases are insufficient to explain attachment preferences.Recent debate about the properties of the human sentence processor has focused both on the purported universality, or cross-linguistic applicability, ofvarious parsing principles (e.g., Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996;Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988; Frazier, 1987a Frazier, , 1987bMitchell & Cuetos, 1991;Schriefers, Friederici, & Kuhn, 1995) and on the degree to which such principles might be replaced by lexically and contextually determined preferences (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995; MacDonald, Pearl mutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994). Although some of the proposals that are intended to account for evidence about lexical and contextual effects also have implications for universality issues (e.g., Tabor, Juliano, & Tanenhaus, 1997; cf. Frazier, 1995), the majority of the work examining one issue has not directly examined the other (cf. Schriefers et al., 1995).The experiments reported in this paper were conducted while V'I. was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research was supported by NIH Fellowship MHI0592 to N.1.P. We greatly appreciate the comments and advice of Chuck Clifton, Don Mitchell, Michael Spivey-Knowlton, and one anonymous reviewer. We also thank Karlos Arregui-Urbina for helping us to conduct the norming survey; and Nereida Diaz, Patricia Pimentel, and San Tunstall for aid in running participants and in analyzing data. Portions ofthis work were presented at the 1996 meeting ofthe Psychonomic Society (Chicago) and at the 1997 CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (Santa Monica, CA). Correspondence should be addressed to E. Gibson, NE20-459, Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, Cambridge, MA 02 I39 (e-mail: gibson@psyche. mit.edu) or to N. 1. Pearlmutter, Psychology Department 125 NI, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 021 15 (pearimutter@neu.edu).One proposed universal parsing principle that has received recent attention with respect to the universality issue is Frazier's (1978Frazier's ( , 1987a late closure principle (see also Kimball's, 1973, right association and Gibson's, 1991, ...

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Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints

Cited by 249 publications

References 22 publications

Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses

Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses

Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: a computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar

Recency and lexical preferences in Spanish

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