Varieties of Ambiguity: What Are We Seeking?

For the past 20 years or so, psycholinguists and computer scientists have become increasingly interested in the problem of ambiguity in natural language processing. For psycholinguists, the work has focused largely on understanding the processes by which people arrive at a single interpretation of a message that has at least two readily discernible meanings. Sentences 1–3 give some classic examples of the kinds of sentences whose comprehension might be of interest in studies of this kind.