The Interaction of Lexical and Syntactic Ambiguity

Abstract

Two experiments investigated comprehension of noun/verb lexical category ambiguities such as trains, in order to determine whether resolution of these ambiguities was similar to other types of ambiguity resolution. Frazier and Rayner (1987, Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 505-526) argued that these ambiguities were resolved with a delay strategy that is not used for other ambiguities. Experiment l′s self-paced reading data replicated Frazier & Rayner′s results but also showed that evidence taken to support delay had other explanations. Experiment 2 investigated the influence of semantic biases on ambiguity resolution and found that three probabilistic factors influenced lexical category ambiguity resolution: (1) the relative frequency of head vs. modifying noun usage of a biasing noun, (2) the frequency of cooccurrence of a biasing noun and category ambiguous word in English, and (3) the combinatorial semantic information in the sentence. The extent to which alternative models account for the use of probabilistic information in ambiguity resolution is discussed.