Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause object/main clause subject ambiguity. The critical ...

Since Perlmutter (1968, 1970) argued that English aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising, the phenomenon has been argued or assumed to exist in a number of other languages, such as French (Lamiroy 1987, Ruwet 1991), German (Wurmbrand 2001), Greek (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1999), Hebrew (Landau 2003), Italian (Rizzi 1982, Burzio 1986), Japanese (Shibatani 1973, 1978, Kuno 1...

Over the last decade Inductive Logic Programming systems have been dominated by use of top-down refinement search techniques. In this paper we re-examine the use of bottom-up approaches to the construction of logic programs. In particular, we explore variants of Plotkin’s Relative Least General Generalisation (RLGG) which are based on subsumption relative to a bottom clause. With Plotkin’s RLGG...

This dissertation considers ambiguity resolution in regard to two issues. First, it investigates factors that lead the human parser to favour some types of interpretations over others when faced with some types of ambiguous input. Second it examines the reanalysis process that takes place when initial biases lead to incorrect interpretations. The first part of the dissertation (Chapter 1) propo...

We describe an approach for resolving relative clause attachment ambiguities using machine learning techniques and WordNet hierarchies. When the relative clause is preceded by the pattern NP1 Prep NP2, a decision has to be made between local and wide attachment. We train a network to make this decision and conclude that knowledge sources like WordNet have a constructive role to play in making s...

This paper presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuing potential nominal heads. Similar to previous results from the processing of English, Spanish and German, we observed the following non-monotonic preference ordering among the three attachment sites: most local, least local, intermediate. We disc...

The so-called Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) construction found in the head-final languages Korean and Japanese has received little attention from computational perspectives even though it is frequently found in both text and speech. This is partly because there have been no grammars precise enough to allow deep processing of the construction’s syntactic and semantic properties. This ...

Using the structural priming paradigm, the present study explores predictions made by the implicit prosody hypothesis (IPH) by testing whether an implicit prosodic boundary generated from a silently read sentence influences attachment preference for a novel, subsequently read sentence. Results indicate that such priming does occur, as evidenced by an effect on relative clause attachment. In par...

In this paper we investigate how case features are represented and processed during language comprehension. To this end, we explored the phenomena of case attraction in German in a series of four experiments using a speeded grammaticality judgment procedure. Case attraction leads to errors that are akin to subject-verb agreement errors intensively studied in English and other languages (e.g. Bo...