Sentence Comprehension 1 Flashcards
What types of syntactically ambiguous sentences are there?
Globally ambiguous and temporarily ambiguous
What is an example of a globally ambiguous sentence?
The criminal shot the cop with the pistol
What are two temporarily ambiguous sentences?
- the criminal shot the dog with the collar
- the criminal shot the dog with the pistol
What is syntactic ambiguity?
What information is used when the grammar does not dictate a particular analysis
What is syntactic ambiguity also called?
Structural attachment
What are garden path sentences?
Sentences that lead you up a dead end when you adopt one analysis, but it turns out to be wrong.
What is the garden path model also called?
Garden path theory
What is parsing?
Syntactic analysis of a sentence
What does garden path model try to explain?
Parsing and both ambiguous and unambiguous sentences
What two simple principles does the parser follow?
Minimal attachment and late closure.
In garden path model what order are the simple principles applied?
First minimal attachment and then late closure.
What does garden path model assume?
That words are incorporated into previous structures immediately, from left to right.
What is minimal attachment?
Fewest nodes in the tree structure. If the sentence is ambiguous it will use the tree structure with the fewest number of additional nodes.
According to minimal attachment what is ambiguous about the sentence “the criminal shot the cop with the pistol”?
The ambiguity lies in whether the pp “with the pistol” is to be attached to the vp “shot” or the np “the cop”.
What is NP?
A noun phrase
What is VP?
A verb phrase
What is DET?
Determiners such as “the” or “a”
What is V?
A verb
What is PP?
Propositional phrase
What is P?
A preposition
What is N?
A noun
Draw VP tree for “the criminal shot the dog with the collar”
13 nodes
Draw NP tree for “the criminal shot the dog with the collar”
14 nodes
Explain the findings of Rayner, Carlson, and Frazier (1983) about minimal attachment (garden path model).
They looked at eye movement in two conditions (VP and NP).
Binoculars and revolver (revolver should be difficult).
Reading times for critical region showed that vp < np which supports the minimal attachment theory.
What happens when there is a no ambiguity solution?
They have equal nodes and therefore you should do the late closure principle
What is the rule of late closure?
If they have the same number of nodes then attach the ambiguous phrase to the lowest part of the tree (the phrase that is currently being processed).
What is a regency preference?
Attaching an ambiguous phrase to the most recent phrase
What are the 3 properties of the garden path model?
Modular model
Serial model
Reanalysis model
In garden path model what is the modular model?
Initial syntactic processing is not influenced by non-syntactic information.
Other information is used after initial syntactic analysis (plausibility can trigger reanalysis).
In garden path model what is the serial model?
Only a single analysis is adopted at a time
In garden path model what is the reanalysis model?
Difficulty occurs when the initial analysis is inconsistent with information that is used later
What does constraint based models argues that the garden model is incorrect?
Syntactic processing is not modular.
Non structural information is used immediately and at the same time as structural information.
Interactive model
What is interactive model in constraint based model
All potentially useful sources of information interact from the very earliest stages of sentence processing.
What are the properties of constraint based models?
Interactive models
Parallel models
Competition models
In constraint based model what is the interactive models?
All sources of information (context, meaning, frequency) are used immediately and interact with each other.
In constraint based model what is the parallel model?
All analysis of an ambiguous structure are activated in parallel. The stronger the support for an analysis, the higher the activation.
In constraint based model what is the competition model?
Difficulty occurs when two or more analyses are about equally activated by the different sources of information.
According to constraint based models when is plausibility used?
Immediately.
What did trueswell, tanenhaus and Garnsey (1994) find about ambiguous sentences?
Plausibility information affects the structural preferences (which agrees with the constraint based model).
What did Clifton et al (2003) find about ambiguous sentences?
That Trueswell et al (1994) used too little participants and they can’t prove the absence of a difference.
So Clifton improved and found that plausibility effect was used in reanalysis which supports garden path model.
