LINGUISTIC ADAPTATIONS FOR RESOLVING AMBIGUITY

We motivate a model of human parsing and ambiguity resolution on the basis of psycholinguistic and typological data. Analysis of spoken and written corpora suggests that ambiguity is a factor in the choice of relativization strategy for English and supports the model’s predictions. Within an evolutionary account of language, we predict that languages will adapt over time so that prosodic and syntactic systems are organised to minimize processing cost according to this model.

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