Sidestepping garden paths: assessing the contributions of syntax, semantics and plausibility in resolving ambiguities.

Number 1013
Year 1996
Drawer 19
Entry Date 06/30/1998
Authors Ni, Weijia, Crain, Stephen, and Shanweiler, Donald.
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Publication Language and Congnitive Processes, 1996, 11 (3), 283-334.
url http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1013.pdf
Abstract A central issue in the study of sentence processing is the manner in which various sources of information are used in resolving structural ambiguities. According to one proposal, the garden path model (e.g. Frazier & Rayner, 1982), perceivers are initially guided by strategies based solely on the structural properties of sentences. Another class of models, constraint satisfaction models, emphasize the influence of lexical properties in decisions among the alternative analyses of an ambiguous sentence fragment (e.g. Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Boland, 1991). In this paper, we explore the prediction of an alternative model, the referential theory (e.g. Crain & Steedman, 1985).
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