Constraint Satisfaction Accounts of Lexical and Sentence Comprehension

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on two types of ambiguity: lexical and syntactic ambiguity. The two kinds of ambiguity can interact—for example, adopting noun vs. verb interpretation of man affects how one interprets the syntactic structure of a sentence containing this word. Despite the close relationship between these two types of ambiguity, for much of the history of modern psycholinguistics they have been studied independently. This division reflected differing views about lexical and syntactic representations. The meanings and other properties of words have often been thought to be stored in the lexicon, a person's mental dictionary. On this view, interpreting words involves looking up, or accessing, information in the lexicon. This process is thought to be autonomous, proceeding in the same way regardless of the context in which a word occurred. It is also thought to make minimal demands on limited capacity working memory and attentional resources, allowing multiple meanings of words to be accessed in parallel. This led to a two-stage model of lexical ambiguity resolution. In the first stage, the lexical system accessed the common meaning or meanings of words; in the second stage, information derived from the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts and the comprehender's background knowledge are used to select the appropriate meaning and integrate it into the developing representation of the sentence.