Abstract

Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available. One of the principal goals for a theory of language compre- third section we consider processing issues: how information is hension is to explain how the reader or listener copes with a processed within the mental lexicon and how contextual inforpervasive ambiguity problem. Languages are structured at mation can influence processing. The central processing mechmultiple levels simultaneously, including lexical, phonological, anism we invoke is the constraint satisfaction process that has morphological, syntactic, and text or discourse levels. At any been realized in interactive-activation models (e.g., Elman &

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