Ambiguity Resolution In The Human Syntactic Parser: An Experimental Study

Models of the human syntactic parsing mechanism can be classified according to the ways in which they operate upon ambiguous input. Each mode of operation carries particular requirements concerning such basic computational characteristics of the parser as i ts storage capacities and the scheduling of i ts processes, and so specifying which mode is actually embodied in human parsing is a useful approach to determining the functional organization of the human parser. In Section l , a preliminary taxonomy of parsing models is presented, based upon a consideration of modes of handling ambiguities; and then, in Section 2, psycholinguist ic evidence is presented which indicates what type of model best describes the human parser.