Sentence parsing: garden path sentences and the constraint based model

Question 1

Garden path theory: Two-stage model of syntactic parsing

Answer 1

1. Identification of word categories
2. semantic rules are applied: higher-level interpretation

• In first-pass, restricted amount of grammatical info, so guided by some parsing tendencies like going for the simplest structure.
• Making choices when more than one syntactic structure is possible:
  -Late closure principle: attach new info to latest clause
  -Minimal attachment: simplest syntactic structure (fewest phrase-structure nodes possible)
• English: late closure
• Spanish: early closure

Question 2

Constraint-Based Model

Answer 2

Broad range of info sources can simultaneously affect the parser’s early decisions, including semantic or contextual info.
Multiple interpretations are accessed in parallel
- Story context effects
- Subcategory effects (visual search, thematic relations eg nº of participants)
- Cross-linguistic data (spanish- early closure, english- late closure)
- Semantic effects: reduced relative clauses take longer to identify
- Prosody (intonation)
- Visual context effects