Abstract
In this paper the relative frequencies of the possible resolutions of ambiguities involving noun phrase attachment sites are compared to the results of off-line psycholinguistic measurements of syntactic complexity. A lack of correlation between the two is observed. It is therefore argued that the comprehension system is distinct from what is driving the frequencies in the corpora. A production heuristic separate from the comprehension system is proposed to account for the observed frequencies.
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We would like to thank Susanne Tunstall for providing linguistic judgments in the corpus analyses reported in Sec. 3.3. We also wish to thank the following people for helpful, comments and discussions on earlier presentations of this paper: the audience at the Eighth Human Sentence Processing Conference, in Tucson Arizona, Maria Babyonyshev, Tom Bever, Martin Corley, Danny Fox, Don Mitchell, Edson Miyamoto, Janet Nicol, Colin Phillips, Gregg Solomon, Michael Spivey-Knowlton, James Thomas, and Tom Wasow. All remaining errors are our own. The second author was supported by the Research Training Grant “Language: Acquisition and Computation” awarded by the National Science Foundation (U.S.) to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (DIR 9113607), and by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Gibson, E., Schütze, C.T. & Salomon, A. The relationship between the frequency and the processing complexity of linguistic structure. J Psycholinguist Res 25, 59–92 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01708420
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01708420