The Resolution of Interdeterminacy During Language Comprehension: Perspectives on Modularity in Lexical, Structural and Pragmatic Process

The resolution of indeterminacy is the hallmark of the language comprehension process. Indeterminacy exists at essentially every descriptive level of word, sentence, and discourse analysis. It is found in conditions ranging from overt ambiguity (such as for polysemous words and structural ambiguity) which have been the focus of work in psycholinguistics since the inception of the field, to less obvious, but equally vexatious, problems involving for such things as phonetic identity, segmentation assignment, thematic role assignment, quan-tifier scope, and co-reference assignment, to name but a few. The problem is so pervasive that about the only generalization that appears possible is that the language processing device seems to resolve these uncertainties. Interestingly, models of language theory (such as linguistic grammars) are traditionally not expressed in terms that capture many of the problems of inde-terminacy; uncertainties of this type are considered to be a problem to be dealt with by processing models, something viewed as performance perturbations over which generalizations are to be made, not facts which are to be captured in models of 'universal grammar'. 1 The immediate focus of this chapter, then, will be on an issue central to processing models: that of how the language processor resolves several types of indeterminacy during comprehension. In what follows, evidence concerning the resolution of co-reference assignment (an issue that involves structural and semantic information processing) and the resolution of lexical ambiguity will be examined. In each case, recent evidence examining the role of different types of 'context' on the resolution of these types of indeterminacy will be examined in detail. Prior to presentation of such evidence, it is important to briefly discuss a fundamental issue that underlies the concern over indeterminacy resolution, the issue of the general nature of the cognitive architecture that supports language processing. One of the central contributions of the information processing ap