Abstract
Is there underspecification in the syntactic phrase marker constructed during on-line sentence analysis? According to the construal hypothesis (Frazier & Clifton, 1996), a very limited amount and type of structural underspecification is available to the human sentence parsing mechanism. Here we present the basic definitions of construal, illustrating the theory with some already published evidence. We also discuss several new pieces of evidence, from our laboratory and elsewhere, that support the construal hypothesis. We end by raising the question of what kind of mechanism operates in the process of interpreting a nonprimary phrase (a phrase that receives an underspecified syntactic analysis), and conclude that it is not a process of competition between multiple activated possible analyses but instead is a process in which the sheer existence of ambiguity need not result in increased processing cost.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Abney, S. (1989). A computational model of human parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 129–144.
Abney, S. (1991). Parsing by chunks. In R. Berwick, S. Abney, & C. Tenny (Eds.), Principle-based parsing (pp. 257–278). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
Abney, S. (1995). Chunks and dependencies: Bringing evidence to bear on syntax, Computational linguistics and linguistic theory. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Brysbaert, M., & Mitchell, D. C. (1996). Modifier attachment in sentence parsing: Evidence from Dutch. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A, 664–695.
Church, K. (1980). On memory limitations in natural language processing. Unpublished masters thesis, MIT.
Clifton, C., Jr., Frazier, L., Rapoport, T., & Radó, J. (1996). Adjunct predication: Attachment or construal? Unpublished manuscript.
Cuetos, F., & Mitchell, D. C. (1988). Cross-linguistic differences in parsing: Restrictions on the use of the late closure strategy in Spanish. Cognition, 30, 73–105.
Duffy, S. A., Morris, R. K., & Rayner, K. (1988). Lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 429–446.
Fernández, E. M. (1995, May). Processing strategies in second language learning: Some preliminary results. Paper presented at Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition, New York.
Frazier, L. (1987). Sentence processing: A tutorial review. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and performance (pp. 559–586). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Frazier, L., & Clifton, C., Jr. (1996). Construal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Frazier, L., & Clifton, C., Jr. (in press). Sentence reanalysis, and visibility. In J. D. Fodor and F. Ferreira (Eds.), Reanalysis in sentence processing. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
Gibson, T., Pearlmutter, N., Canseco-Gonzales, E., & Hickok, G. (1996). Recency preference in the human sentence processing mechanism. Cognition, 59, 23–59.
Gilboy, E., Sopena, J., Clifton, C. J., & Frazier, L. (1995). Argument structure and association preferences in Spanish and English compound NPs. Cognition, 54, 131–167.
Gorrell, P. (1995). Syntax and parsing. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Grimshaw, J. (1991). Extended projections. Unpublished manuscript, Brandeis University.
Hemforth, B., Konieczny, L., & Scheepers, C. (1996, March). Syntactic and anaphoric processes in modifier attachment. Poster presented at the Ninth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York.
Hemforth, B., Konieczny, L., & Scheepers, C. (in press). Syntactic attachment and anaphor resolution: The two sides of relative clause attachment. In M. Crocker, M. Pickering, & C. Clifton (Eds.), Architecture and mechanisms of language processing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Igoa, J. M. (1995, April). Parsing decisions and the construal hypothesis: Attachment preferences in primary phrases in Spanish. Paper presented at the Second Symposium on Psycholinguistics, Tarragona, Spain.
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the mental representation of discourse referents. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676–703.
Marcus, M., Hindle, D., & Fleck, M. (1983). D-theory: Talking about talking about trees. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Cambridge, MA. (pp 129–136).
Perfetti, C. (1990). The cooperative language processors: Semantic influences in an autonomous syntax. In D. A. Balota, G. B. Flores d'Arcais, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Comprehension processes in reading (pp. 205–230). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schafer, A., Carter, J., Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L. (1996). Focus in relative clause construal. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 135–163.
Sturt, P., & Crocker, M. (1996). Monotonic syntactic processing: A cross-linguistic study of attachment and reanalysis. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 449–494.
Tanenhaus, M., Spivey-Knowlton, M., & Hanna, J. (1995, December). Modeling discourse context effects: A multiple constraints approach. Abstracts of the Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, University of Edinburg.
Traxler, M., Pickering, M., & Clifton, C., Jr. (1996). Reading ambiguous and disambiguated sentences. Unpublished manuscript.
Trueswell, J. C., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1994). Toward a lexicalist framework of constraint-based syntactic ambiguity resolution. In C. Clifton, K. Rayner, & L. Frazier (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing (pp. 155–179). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Frazier, L., Clifton, C. Construal: Overview, Motivation, and Some New Evidence. J Psycholinguist Res 26, 277–295 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025024524133
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025024524133