Abstract

This paper investigates the extent to which existing structural commitments constrain the human parser's search for analyses of new incoming material, specifically whether a Reanalysis as a Last Resort (RALR) strategy applies to sentence parsing. Two self-paced reading experiments investigated this issue using a structural ambiguity in which a local, easy reanalysis parse is pitted against a non-local attachment requiring no reanalysis. This ambiguity is created by embedding classic noun phrase/sentential complement ambiguities inside a relative clause modifying a subject NP, as in strings like The woman who knows the man wrote some articles himself/herself..., and examining whether readers parse the ambiguous phrase wrote some articles himself/herself as a matrix clause or as an embedded clause. The results of both experiments indicate that readers' existing structural commitments do constrain their subsequent parsing decisions: non-local analyses which avoid reanalysis are consistent...

Citations