Parsing and syntactic ambiguity - SM3 Flashcards
‘since jay always jogs a mile and a half seems a very short distance to him’ - which theory doesn’t work here?
late closure - would suggest you attach the mile and a half to ‘jogs’ but you don’t
What happened in the eye tracking study when people were given this sentence: ‘since jay always jogs a mile and a half seems a very short distance to him’, or the same sentence with the word ‘this’ after ‘half’? (2) What is this evidence for?
- sentence 1 is slower to read, with longer fixation on ‘seems’
- sentence 1 has more regressions from disambiguating region to ambiguous region
- evidence for a serial parser guided by late closure
What did garden path sentences lead to in Rayner and Frazier’s minimal attachment study?
- longer fixations at disambiguation point
- more regressive eye movements
What is referential context?
letting you know what part of a sentence is referring to
What happened to garden path effects (minimal attachment) in the safe sentences when context was provided?
when told there would be multiple safes, people were slower to react when they weren’t told which safe it was
so the context seemed to change the effect
What is referential theory? (4)
- incremental parallel processing - alternative parses generated in parallel each time a new word is encountered
- weak interaction - context can affect selection between alternatives
- no such thing as truly neutral context
- context can override the garden path effect
What does it mean to view language as modular?
it is unaffected by other aspects of cognitive processing
How did visual context (towels and apples) affect the way the sentence is parsed? What theory does this go against?
- one referent condition = slower for ambiguous sentences
- two referent condition = similar for ambiguous and unambiguous
- goes against the garden path theory
What is animacy?
how much something is able to act itself
What did Trueswell et al find when looking at animacy with the word ‘examined’? (3) (the defendant examined by…, or the evidence examined by…)
- animacy makes a difference to the garden path effect
- people are more confused in the animate example when it is reduced than when unreduced (fully explained)
- no difference for inanimate example
What does the animacy study suggest?
- people use animacy as context to expect things from the sentence
- evidence against a fully autonomous parser
What are constraint-based frameworks? (5)
- parser considers options in parallel
- evidence in favour of parses accumulates over time
- multiple sources of constraints provide evidence for competing parses
- ambiguity resolution viewed as a constraint satisfaction process
- this process leads to faster interpretation
How do English and Spanish speakers differ in their interpretation of ambiguous sentences?
- Spanish prefer early closure
- English prefer late closure
(although just a 60/40 split)
What is another reason for some syntactic preferences/problems? What can this be thought of as?
limited memory resources
- thought of as a resource constraint (locality)
