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Abstract:
We report an eye-movement study that provides
evidence that the use of subcategorisation information during
syntactic ambiguity resolution is delayed. Some studies
(Mitchell, 1987; Van Gompel & Pickering, in press; but cf.
Adams et al., 1998) have found evidence for reading difficulty at
"the vet" in (1a) relative to (1b), suggesting that
subcategorisation information is initially ignored.
1a. While the dog struggled the vet took off the
muzzle.
1b. While the dog scratched the vet took off the muzzle.
These findings are often taken as evidence against
frequency-based accounts of parsing (e.g., MacDonald et al.,
1994; Trueswell et al., 1993).
However, some frequency-based models (e.g.,
Juliano & Tanenhaus, 1996; Tabor & Tanenhaus, 1999) can
account for these results, because they claim that the parser
employs frequency information associated with specific verbs as
well as frequency information associated with verbs in general
(cf. Mitchell et al., 1995). Because verbs occur more often
transitively than intransitively, the direct object analysis may
be activated in (1a).
We tested models that claim that the processor
uses both lexically specific and category-general frequency
information by investigating sentences like (2):
2a. The nurse heard the man the radio in the
opposite room kept annoying in the corridor.
2b. Not surprisingly the man the radio in the opposite room kept
annoying complained a lot.
2c. The nurse heard the man who the radio in the opposite room
kept annoying in the corridor.
2d. Not surprisingly the man who the radio in the opposite room
kept annoying complained a lot.
In (2a), subcategorisation information of the
monotransitive verb "heard" rules out the analysis in which "the
radio" is the direct object of the preceding verb. This
contrasts with ditransitive verbs such as (3):
3. The nurse gave the man the radio in the
opposite room.
Importantly, verbs occur monotransitively more
often than ditransitively. This rules out the possibility
that there is a general verb preference for the direct object
analysis. In order to eliminate the possibility that
difficulty occurs in (2a) because it is the start of a new
clause, we contrasted it with (2b), where "the radio" is the
subject and cannot be attached to a preceding verb. Both
conditions were compared with baseline conditions (2c) and (2d),
which contained "who".
First-pass reading times for the region "in the
opposite room" showed a significant interaction between the
grammatical role of "the radio" and the presence of "who".
Sentence (2a) took longer to read than (2c), whereas no clear
difference occurred between (2b) and (2d). This indicates
that readers initially analysed "the radio" as the direct object
of "heard". We conclude that readers ignore both lexically
specific and category-general subcategorisation
information. Interestingly, this does not appear to be due
to a simple temporal delay in the availability of
subcategorisation information. If it were a temporal delay,
we would expect that the intervening phrase "the man" provided a
sufficient delay for the processor to access the verb information
before it encountered "the radio". We argue that inherent
properties of the sentence processor preclude the immediate use
of subcategorisation information. Our results provide
evidence against frequency-based accounts of parsing, and support
models that claim that frequency information is initially ignored
(Frazier, 1987; Pickering et al., 2000).
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