Lexical semantics as a basis for argument structure frequency biases

In language comprehension, the in uence of the frequency of various elements has long been recognized, with more frequent elements typically being processed more quickly or easily than less frequent ones. This has been most obvious for words (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1980; Morton, 1969; Rayner & Du y, 1986), but the frequency of a range of elements which must be accessed and combined to interpret sentences has recently been argued to play an important role in comprehension (e.g., Jurafsky, 1996; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Mitchell & Cuetos, 1991; Tabor, Juliano, & Tanenhaus, 1997; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994; cf. Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998). Even in models where the frequency of elements is not one of the primary sources of information used during sentence processing, it still comes into play during later stages (e.g., Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; Frazier, 1995; Mitchell, 1989). These claims have been supported primarily by ambiguity resolution studies, where the relative frequencies of all of the following have been shown to in uence preferences for di erent interpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases: (1) a word's alternative grammatical categories (Juliano & Tanenhaus, 1994; MacDonald, 1993; Tabor et al., 1997), (2) a verb's alternative morphological tense markings (Trueswell, 1996), and (3) alternative argument structures for verbs and nouns (e.g., Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995; Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997; MacDonald, 1994; Pearlmutter & Mendelsohn, 1998; Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995; Taraban & McClelland, 1988; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993). These results are analogous to earlier ndings in lexical ambiguity resolution, where the relative frequency of the di erent possible meanings of a word (e.g., bank as a nancial institution vs. as the edge of a river) in part determines which meaning is preferred during comprehension (e.g., Rayner & Du y, 1986; Simpson, 1984; Tabossi, Colombo,

[1]  Don C. Mitchell,et al.  Verb guidance and other lexical effects in parsing , 1989 .

[2]  P. Tabossi,et al.  Accessing lexical ambiguity: Effects of context and dominance , 1987 .

[3]  A. Wierzbicka.  English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary , 1987 .

[4]  David R. Dowty.  Thematic proto-roles and argument selection , 1991 .

[5]  Whitney Tabor,et al.  Lexical Change as Nonlinear Interpolation , 1995 .

[6]  Michael K. Tanenhaus,et al.  Parsing in a Dynamical System: An Attractor-based Account of the Interaction of Lexical and Structural Constraints in Sentence Processing , 1997 .

[7]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution , 1994 .

[8]  G. Simpson.  Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of word recognition. , 1984, Psychological bulletin.

[9]  Michelle A. Hollander,et al.  The learnability and acquisition of the dative alternation , 1989 .

[10]  Suzanne Stevenson Paolo Merlo.  Lexical structure and parsing complexity , 1997 .

[11]  Julie C. Sedivy,et al.  Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints , 1995, Cognition.

[12]  M. Pickering,et al.  Adjunct attachment is not a form of lexical ambiguity resolution , 1998 .

[13]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation , 1996, Cogn. Sci..

[14]  J. Henderson,et al.  Use of verb information in syntactic parsing: evidence from eye movements and word-by-word self-paced reading. , 1990, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[15]  M A Just,et al.  A theory of reading: from eye fixations to comprehension. , 1980, Psychological review.

[16]  Mark Redekopp,et al.  Inheritance , 1894, The Hospital.

[17]  Michael K. Tanenhaus,et al.  Verb Argument Structure in Parsing and Interpretation: Evidence from wh-Questions , 1995 .

[18]  Mark Aronoff,et al.  Word Formation in Generative Grammar , 1979 .

[19]  J. Trueswell.  THE ROLE OF LEXICAL FREQUENCY IN SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY RESOLUTION , 1996 .

[20]  L Frazier,et al.  Constraint satisfaction as a theory of sentence processing , 1995, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[21]  Maryellen C. MacDonald,et al.  Probabilistic constraints and syntactic ambiguity resolution , 1994 .

[22]  K. Rayner,et al.  Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: Effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity , 1986, Memory & cognition.

[23]  M K Tanenhaus,et al.  A constraint-based lexicalist account of the subject/object attachment preference , 1994, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[24]  N. Pearlmutter,et al.  Serial versus Parallel Sentence Comprehension , 1998 .

[25]  Letitia R. Naigles,et al.  Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure , 1991 .

[26]  Christopher T. Kello,et al.  Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths. , 1993, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[27]  M. MacDonald.  The interaction of lexical and syntactic ambiguity , 1993 .

[28]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  Remarks on Nominalization , 2020, Nominalization.

[29]  Paola Merlo,et al.  A corpus-based analysis of verb continuation frequencies for syntactic processing , 1994 .

[30]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Constituent Attachment and Thematic Role Assignment in Sentence Processing: Influences of Content-Based Expectations , 1988 .

[31]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Sentence comprehension: A parallel distributed processing approach , 1989, Language and Cognitive Processes.

[32]  John J. L. Morton,et al.  Interaction of information in word recognition. , 1969 .

[33]  Beth Levin,et al.  English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation , 1993 .

[34]  Edward Gibson,et al.  Argumenthood and English Prepositional Phrase Attachment , 1999 .

[35]  M. MacDonald,et al.  Individual Differences and Probabilistic Constraints in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution , 1995 .