We monitored 8- and 10-year-old children's eye movements as they read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity to obtain a detailed record of their online processing. Children showed the classic garden-path effect in online processing. Their reading was disrupted following disambiguation, relative to control sentences containing a comma to block the ambiguity, although the disruptio...

We monitored 8-and-10-year-old children’s eye movements as they read sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity to obtain a detailed record of their online processing. Children showed the classic garden-path effect in online processing. Their reading was disrupted following disambiguation, relative to control sentences containing a comma to block the ambiguity, although the disruption...

Our investigation focuses on several types of structural ambiguity in European Portuguese. The materials include sentences with set-divider adverbs ambiguous as to the direction of syntactic attachment, adjunct and complement PPs ambiguous as to the level of syntactic embedding, nonrestrictive clauses with local and non-local possible antecedents, and relative clauses ambiguous as to their rest...

We conducted an Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to identify brain regions that are recruited by linguistic stimuli requiring relatively demanding semantic or syntactic processing. We included 54 functional MRI studies that explicitly varied the semantic or syntactic processing load, while holding constant demands on earlier stages of processing. We included studies that int...

The objective of the present paper is to analyse syntactic ambiguity of prepositional groups (Pg’s) within the background of dependency oriented Functional Generative Description (FGD). Several basic types of Pg-ambiguity are presented and the possibilities of searching for their occurrences in the Prague Dependency Tree Bank (PDT) is illustrated. Criteria for automatic Pg-ambiguity detection a...

Lojban is a constructed language based on predicate logic, with no syntactic ambiguity and carefully controllable semantic ambiguity. It originated in the middle of the last century, and there is now a community of several hundred human speakers. It is argued here that Lojban++, a minor variation on Lojban, would be highly suitable as a language for communication between humans and early-stage ...

We motivate a model of human parsing and ambiguity resolution on the basis of psycholinguistic and typological data. Analysis of spoken and written corpora suggests that ambiguity is a factor in the choice of relativization strategy for English and supports the model’s predictions. Within an evolutionary account of language, we predict that languages will adapt over time so that prosodic and sy...

We report the results of experiments designed to investigate the effects of prosodic boundaries on resolving ambiguous syntactic clause boundaries in Japanese. The head-final, prodrop nature of this language generates abundant syntactic attachment ambiguity for sentences that contain relative clauses. Two types of sentences with differing head nouns modified by relative clauses were examined. S...

This paper presents a method of ambiguity resolution for natural language processing in intelligent English learning support systems. Ambiguity of interpretation of sentences is one of the most important problems for intelligent language learning support systems which allow learners input composed sentences freely. Our system has a question and answer function which asks learners the contents o...

We report the results of one written and one auditory study that examined prosodic effects on resolving the ambiguity of participle constructions in English (e.g., Aaron followed a poor guy drinking his soda). These participle constructions behave similarly to the ambiguous prepositional phrases that can be attached to the verb phrase or to the immediately preceding noun. In the literature, the...