Underspecification of syntactic ambiguities : Evidence from self-paced reading

globally ambiguous sentences are more difficult to process than unambiguous sentences. For instance, some constraintbased parsing models (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; McRae, Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998; Spivey & Tanenhaus, 1998; Tabor & Tanenhaus, 1999) posit that sentences with syntactic ambiguities generally take longer to read than their unambiguous counterparts (see Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995, for a particularly clear statement of this claim). According to these models, multiple structures are incrementally activated during sentence comprehension. These interpretations compete to become the final one. When the sentential and contextual information being considered fails to produce a clear winner, such as with ambiguous strings, the various interpretations engage in a disruptive competition in which constraints from multiple levels of representation must be considered and weighted over a longer period of time before the system settles on a chosen interpretation. In sum, ambiguous strings in this view typically slow down reading.1 However, it has been difficult to demonstrate processing costs for syntactic ambiguity itself, rather than for difficulties caused when early information favors one analysis and later information favors a different analysis (Clifton, Staub, & Rayner, 2007; Gibson & Pearlmutter, 2000; Lewis, 2000). Furthermore, this ambiguity disadvantage assumption has been challenged by a line of studies showing that some syntactic ambiguities can actually lead to shorter processing times (Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998; van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Liversedge, 2005; van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2001). In each of these studies, participants read ambiguous sentences and disambiguated variants while their eye movements were monitored. The readers consistently displayed ambiguity advantages in these studies. For example, Traxler et al. studied a form of relative clause ambiguity (see Sentences 1–3 below) in which a relative clause modifies either a head noun (maid/son) or an adjunct of the head noun ( princess). Traxler et al. showed that it took less time for people to read ambiguous sentences, such as Sentence 1,

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