The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two selfpaced reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. Recent constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution have proposed that for a reduced relative clause (e.g., ‘‘The room searched by the police was . . .’’), both the participle and past tense forms of the ambiguous verb (‘‘searched’’) a...

Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate the functional interplay between discourse-level referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing of phrases. We manipulated both the syntactic/semantic coherence of a noun phrase (NP) and the referential ambiguity of the same NP. Incoherence of the NP elicited a P600 effect in both experiments. Referentia...

Descriptions. In recent years, both formal and computational linguistics have been exploiting descriptions of structures where previously the structures themselves were used. The practice started with (Marcus et al., 1983), who demonstrated the value of (syntactic) tree descriptions for near-deterministic incremental parsing. Vijay-Shankar (Vijay-Shankar and Joshi, 1988; Vijay-Shankar, 1992) us...

A central issue in sentence-processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction mad...

This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California. Research with monolingual Spanish and English speake...

Two experiments investigated the interaction of intonation boundaries and verb bias during spoken language comprehension in English. An online cross-modal naming task proved to be sensitive to the interaction of prosodic, syntactic, and semantic representations during resolution of a temporary syntactic closure ambiguity (e.g., Whenever the lady checks the room...). The results supported previo...

Spoken language comprehension is known to involve a large left-dominant network of fronto-temporal brain regions, but there is still little consensus about how the syntactic and semantic aspects of language are processed within this network. In an fMRI study, volunteers heard spoken sentences that contained either syntactic or semantic ambiguities as well as carefully matched low-ambiguity sent...

Sentences are far more ambiguous than one might have thought. There may be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of syntactic parse trees for certain very natural sentences of English. This fact has been a major problem confronting natural language processing, especially when a large percentage of the syntactic parse trees are enumerated during semantic/pragmatic processing. In this paper we propose som...