This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple informationtheoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates its equivalence to the theory of Hale (2001), in which the difficulty of a word is proportional to its surprisal (its negative log-probability) in the context within which it appears. This proposal subsumes and clarifies findings that high-constraint contexts can facilitate lexical processing, and connects these findings to well-known models of parallel constraint-based comprehension. In addition, the theory leads to a number of specific predictions about the role of expectation in syntactic comprehension, including the reversal of locality-based difficulty patterns in syntactically constrained contexts, and conditions under which increased ambiguity facilitates processing. The paper examines a range of established results bearing on these predictions, and shows that they are largely consistent with the surprisal theory.

This article addresses the question of how the processor decides on its initial strategy for syntactic ambiguity resolution. At a point of ambiguity, more than one analysis is possible. An effective strategy might be to adopt the analysis that has most frequently turned out to be correct in the past. Assuming that the world stays the same in most respects, the analysis that has most frequently been correct in the past should provide a good estimate of which analysis is most likely to be correct again. Hence, by adopting this analysis, the processor should make fewer errors than if it chose any other analysis

Scholfield and Ricardo Russo for detailed statistical advice. We also thank Don Mitchell and the members of our Psycholinguistics Research Group (in particular Claudia Felser, Roger Hawkins, Theodoris Marinis, Leah Roberts) for comments and helpful suggestions. L1 and L2 Sentence Processing 2 To contribute to a better understanding of L2 sentence processing, the present study examines how second language (L2) learners parse temporary ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses. Results are reported from both off-line and on-line experiments with three groups of advanced learners of Greek, with Spanish, German or Russian as native language (L1), as well as results from corresponding experiments with a control group of adult native speakers of Greek. We found that despite their native-like mastery of the construction under investigation, the L2 learners showed different relative clause attachment preferences than the native speakers. Moreover, the L2 learners did not exhibit L1-based preferences in L2 Greek, as might be expected if they were directly influenced by attachment preferences from their native language. We suggest that L2 learners integrate information relevant for parsing differently from native speakers, with the L2 learners relying more on lexical cues than the native speakers and less on purely structurally-based parsing strategies. L1 and L2 Sentence Processing 3

This study compares the way English-speaking children and adult second language leamers of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 leamers of English with Greek or German as their L 1 participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. While the participants' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical-semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent NPs (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they were applying any structure-based ambiguity resolution strategies of the type that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. These findings differ markedly from those obtained from 6 to 7 year- old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study (Felser, Marinis, & Clahsen, submitted) in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that whereas children primarily rely on structure-based parsing principles during processing, adult L2 leamers are guided mainly by non-structural information.

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically compatible with only a proper subpart of the input are sometimes constructed, at least temporarily. Three self-paced reading experiments probed for interference from such locally coherent structures. The first tested for a distracting effect of irrelevant Subject–Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase–Verb Phrase sequences (e.g., The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee) on reading times. The second addressed the question of whether the interference effects can be treated as lexical interference, instead of involving the formation of locally coherent syntactic structures. The third replicated the reading time effects of the first two experiments with grammaticality judgments. We evaluate the dynamical account, comparing it to other approaches that also predict effects of local coherence, and arguing against accounts which rule out the formation of merely locally coherent structures.

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s concentrated on the rarer instances of meaning ambiguity, where a word (e.g., bank, coach) has unrelated interpretations (e.g., Swinney, 1979; Rayner & Duffy, 1986). Here, the main focus is on what has traditionally been termed metonymy: Dickens can refer literally to the man or metonymically to his writings, and Vietnam can refer literally to the country or metonymically to the Vietnam War. The second type of expression that we are concerned with is illustrated by began the book, which can mean "began reading the book", "began writing the book", or indeed other things (Jackendoff, 1997; Pustejovsky, 1995). Such ambiguities appear to arise when the semantic requirements of the verb are not met by the complement; here, because a verb like began requires a complement that denotes an event, but when the actual complement is a noun phrase that denotes an entity. The processor resolves this problem by inserting relevant semantic content (reading, writing, or whatever) via what has been te

has been devoted to working out the Parallel Architecture, a framework for linguistic theory which preserves all the mentalistic and biological aspects of mainstream generative grammar (MGG) (e.g. Chomsky 1965, 1981, 1995, 2000), but which employs a theoretical technology better in tune with discoveries of the last 30 years about linguistic structure. The present article sketches the Parallel Architecture and shows why it is preferable to the classical approach on theoretical grounds. It also shows how the Parallel Architecture lends itself to a much more direct relation between theories of linguistic structure and theories of language processing than has been possible within MGG, especially in its most recent incarnations. 1. Goals of a theory of language processing – and goals of language processing Let’s begin with some truisms that help set the scope of the problem. A theory of language processing has to explain how language users convert sounds into meanings in language perception and how they convert meanings into sounds in language production. One part of the theory has to describe what language users store in long-term memory that enables them to do this. Another part of the theory has to describe how the material

We report three eye-movement experiments that investigated whether alternative syntactic analyses compete during

In line with recent studies we propose a model of human sentence processing that is based on Optimality Theory (OT). Rather than explaining parsing preferences through extralinguistically motivated parsing strategies or frequencies in the hearer’s linguistic environment, our model explains these preferences as the intermediate results of the incremental application of our OT grammar. In contrast to most other current OT-approaches to language processing, we use constraints from OT semantics rather than from OT syntax to explain on-line comprehension. We illustrate the workings of our model by investigating the comprehension of coordination, a phenomenon which is ill-understood from a competence perspective and sparsely investigated from a processing perspective. The psycholinguistic evidence that is currently available strongly suggests that the on-line comprehension of coordinate structures is influenced by constraints from many different information sources: pragmatics, discourse semantics, lexical semantics, and syntax. The competence / performance model we propose is able to formalize this cross-modular constraint interaction, and to yield concrete predictions with respect to both intermediate parsing preferences and ultimate interpretations.