tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "THE BY RESOLUTION OF LOCAL SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY THE HUMAN SENTENCE PROCESSING MECHANISM"

or not a referring expression provides sufficient information with which to identify a unique referent. Such an approach relies on the provision of adequate contextual information, something which has been lacking in experiments w h i c h have been. In support of this claim, Rayner et al. collected r e a d i n g times and eye movement data for sentences which, syntactically speaking, allow two attachment sites for a prepositional phrase. | THE RESOLUTION OF LOCAL SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY BY THE HUMAN SENTENCE PROCESSING MECHANISM. Gerry Altmann Department of Linguistics University of Edinburgh George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LL. GB ABSTRACT The resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism is a topic which has provoked considerable interest in recent years. At issue is whether such ambiguities are resolved on the basis of syntactic information alone cf. Minimal Attachment Frazier 1979 or whether they are resolved on some other basis. Crain Steedman 1982 suggest that the resolution process is governed not by Minimal Attachment but instead by whether or not a referring expression provides sufficient information with which to identify a unique referent. Such an approach relies on the provision of adequate contextual information something which has been lacking in experiments which have been claimed to support Minimal Attachment. In this paper I shall consider a number of such experiments and the different patterns of results which emerge once contextual information is provided. Although the importance of contextual information will be stressed I shall briefly consider reasons why parsing preferences arise in the absence of any explicit prior context. The conclusion is that computational models of syntactic ambiguity resolution which are based on evidence which has ignored contextual considerations are models of something other than natural language processing. There has been much controversy recently surrounding the processes responsible for the garden path effect Ln the following kind of example The oil tycoon sold the off-shore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to kill . The garden path effect arises here because the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism HSPM encounters during the processing of this sentence a local syntactic ambiguity. The word sold is ambiguous it can be interpreted either as a simple active or it can be interpreted as a past participle in a reduced