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<Paper uid="P84-1103">
  <Title>AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION IN THE HUMAN SYNTACTIC PARSER: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="483" end_page="483" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
(Sf) COMPLEMENT SENTENCE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The psychologist told the wife that to (yell was not constructive..) It turned out that context had no effect on performance for this type of item. Rather, subjects performed somewhat more poorly when the &amp;quot;that&amp;quot;-clause was disambiguated as a relative (5e), showing about 20% errors and sometimes elevated RTs, as compared with the complement disambiguation in (5f), which showed low RTs and practically no errors. The effect did not differ in strength between the two contexts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> These results along with those of Crain &amp; Steedman show that initially the complement resolution is preferred but that later this preference can be overturned in favor of the relative resolution if that is what best fits the context. Now, there is no reason to believe that subjects are actually garden-pathed when they end up adopting the relative resolution. Note that there is no conscious experience of garden-pathing, and that the error and RT effects here are much weaker than for classical garden-pathing items like (1). It seems more likely that both possible analyses of &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; have been determined but that one--as a complementizer--has been initially ranked higher and so is initially more accessible. In this speeded task, it would be expected that the less accessible relative pronoun analysis of &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; would sometimes be missed--resulting in incorrect responses for (5e)--or take longer to achieve. Now, if &amp;quot;that&amp;quot; had simply not been analyzed at all by the time of the presentation of the last word, as in a DPA or Abandonment model, there would be little reason to expect that one analysis of it should cause more errors than the other.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> So, we may tentatively conclude that IPA-with-strong-parallelism describes the human parser's operations for at least certain types of structures.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Similar results with other sorts of structures are consistent with this claim. This does not rule out the possibility, however, that the human parser is a hybrid, utilizing delay or abandonment in some other circumstances.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Why is the complementizer analysis immediately preferred for &amp;quot;that&amp;quot;? In these items all of the main verbs of the ambiguous sentences had meanings which involved some notion of communication of a message from one party to another (e.g., &amp;quot;told&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;taught&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;reminded&amp;quot;). In Kurtzman (1984) it is argued that such verbs generate strong expectations for conceptual information about the nature of the message that is communicated. The complement resolution of the &amp;quot;that&amp;quot;-clause permits the clause to directly express this expected information, and so it would be preferred over the relative resolution, which generally would not result in expression of the information. It is also possible that such a conceptually-based preference gets encoded as a higher ranking for the verbs' particular lexical representations which subcategorize for the complement (cf. Ford et al., 1982).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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