Sentence Comprehension

Question 1

Give an example of a temporarily ambiguous sentence

Answer 1

“The man shot the dog with the collar”

Question 2

What is the minimal attachment principle?

Answer 2

Involves, where grammatically possible, attaching an ambiguous phrase to a tree structure using the fewest possible nodes.

Question 3

Give an example of a globally ambiguous sentence

Answer 3

“The cop shot the prisoner with the gun”

Question 4

What is incremental sentence processing?

Answer 4

Words are incorporated into previous sentence structures from left to right.

Question 5

What are the three main properties of the garden path model?

Answer 5

1) the modular model: initial syntactic information is not influenced by non-syntactic information such as plausibility.
Other information is then considered after the initial syntactic analysis
2) the serial model: only a single model is adopted at a time
3) the reanalysis model: difficulty occurs when the initial analysis is inconsistent with the information used later. This triggers reanalysis.

Question 6

Describe ONE experiment which shows evidence for the garden path model.

Answer 6

Traxler et al (1998)
Two sentences:
1) the steak with the sauce that was tough didn’t win a prize
2) the steak with the sauce that was runny didn’t win a prize
Reading times for phrase one were longer as it violates late closure

Question 7

What do constraint based models argue for over garden path theory?

Answer 7

Constraint based models argue that syntactic processing is not modular

Question 8

What are the three properties of constraint based models?

Answer 8

1) Interactive models: all sources of information are used immediately and interact with each other
2) Parallel models: all analyses for a structure are activated in parallel. The stronger the support for an analysis, the higher it’s activation
3) Competition models: difficulty occurs when two or more analyses are equally activated.

Question 9

What is the difference between when plausibility is used in constraint based models and the garden path model?

Answer 9

Constraint based models use plausibility immediately. The garden path model initially ignores plausibility.

Question 10

What is referential theory?

Answer 10

It explains how discourse context may effect syntactic ambiguity resolution. It predicts that the interpretation which contains the fewest unsatisfied presuppositions is preferred.

Question 11

Give an example of referential theory

Answer 11

“The criminal shot the cop with the pistol”
No sentential context is used. “With the pistol” implies more than one cop. No context to suggest this. Therefore an unsatisfied presupposition.
The VP attachment should be preferred, which attached “with the pistol” to shot and suggests only one cop. The presupposition is then satisfied.

Question 12

What is a discourse presupposition?

Answer 12

An implicit assumption taken from written or spoken communication.

Question 13

When do garden path theory and referential theory agree on processing?

Answer 13

When there is no context, both believe in late closure and minimal attachment

Question 14

What is the attachment preference of the garden path model in a multi-referent context

Answer 14

VP attachment

Question 15

When is the attachment preference of referential theory in a multi-referent context?

Answer 15

NP attachment preference

Question 16

Describe the experiment by Altmann and Steedman (1988)

Answer 16

An experiment measuring reading times.
4 sentences, a combination of 1 referent, 2 referents, NP attachment and VP attachment. Mismatch conditions such as 1 referent and NP, 2 referents and VP should be hard to read according to referential theory. Garden path model states that NP attachments would be hard to read.
Their findings agreed with referential theory.

Question 17

Describe Clifton and Ferreira (1989) argument against Altmann and Steedman (1988)

Answer 17

They argued the findings could be interpreted as garden path model because the g-p model states the person needs to have access to referential information later on but it is available right away. Also, it was a self reading task so would not distinguish between first analysis and reanalysis.

Question 18

How do constraint based theories take into account the ideas of referential theory?

Answer 18

They also take into account frequency information to begin with.