Lexical access and syntactic processing of categorial ambiguities.
Item
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Title
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Lexical access and syntactic processing of categorial ambiguities.
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Identifier
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AAI9218264
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identifier
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9218264
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Creator
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Roth, Leslie Erica.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Martin Chodorow
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Psychobiology | Language, Linguistics | Psychology, Experimental
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Abstract
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Categorial ambiguity has important consequences for syntactic parsing, as part of speech determines which new nodes are created, when phrases are completed, and where they are attached in the phrase marker. In addition, lexical access of systematic categorially ambiguous words (SCA's) might differ from that of other types of ambiguity in that they might be stored under one lexical entry. This is contrasted with other forms of lexical ambiguity where the different meanings of a word are believed to be stored in separate lexical entries.;The present study investigated SCA's in syntactically ambiguous and disambiguated sentence contexts. Based on evidence by Frazier and Rayner (1987), Frazier (1990) has argued that categorial ambiguity must be resolved before parsing can proceed, necessitating the parser to delay processing when context cannot disambiguate category.;These experiments were devised to examine this claim. Experiment I included a Continuous Syntactic Decision (CSD) task, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), and a sentence completion task. The results suggest that the parser delays upon encountering Noun/Verb SCA's in ambiguous sentence contexts. It also appears from these data that the parser exhibits a syntactic preference for a Determiner-Noun-Verb structure. Another major finding was that the parser initially expects the head noun to follow the determiner.;Experiment II corroborated the preference of the parser for Determiner-Noun-Verb. In addition, in Experiment IIa, the relative frequency of usage of the noun and verb forms predicted naming preference for SCA's presented without sentential context, whereas, in Experiment IIb, naming was controlled by the syntactic context of the sentence. Results were also consistent with a model of the lexicon in which SCA's are represented by a single entry.;Experiment III used a CSD task and sentences containing noun phrases of varying lengths. Results further supported the findings of Experiment I, that the parser anticipates a head noun directly succeeding a determiner, contrary to Frazier's claim that the head noun is assigned incidentally, as a by-product of parsing the noun phrase. The exception was when the word following the determiner was an Adjective/Noun SCA with a dominant adjective usage.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
