Processing Temporary Syntactic Ambiguity: The Effect of Contextual Bias

This paper reports two experiments using sentences with a temporary ambiguity between a direct object and a sentence complement analysis that is resolved toward the normally preferred direct object analysis. Postverbal noun phrases in these sentences could be ambiguously attached as either a direct object or the subject of a sentence complement, whereas in unambiguous versions of the sentences the subcategorization of the verb forced the direct object interpretation. Participants read these sentences in relatively long paragraph contexts, where the context supported the direct object analysis (“preferred”), supported the sentence complement analysis (“unpreferred”), or provided conflicting evidence about both analyses (“conflicting”). Self-paced reading times for ambiguous postverbal noun phrases were almost equivalent to the reading times of their unambiguous counterparts, even in unpreferred and conflicted context conditions. However, time to read a following region, which forced the direct object interpretation, was affected by the interaction of verb subcategorization ambiguity and contextual support. The full pattern of results do not fit well with either an unelaborated single-analysis (“garden path”) model or a competitive constraint-satisfaction model, but are consistent with a race model in which multiple factors affect the speed of constructing a single initial analysis.