RESOLVING SYNTACTIC CATEGORY AMBIGUITIES IN DISCOURSE CONTEXT - PROBABILISTIC AND DISCOURSE CONSTRAINTS

Three experiments investigated the resolution of syntactic category am biguities in a self-paced reading paradigm, using moving window presen tation. Sentences containing noun/verb homographs like duck (e.g., She saw her duck and chickens/stumble near the barn.) were embedded in sh ort stories. The first experiment reports the collection of several ty pes of norms to measure the degree to which each homograph was biased toward use as a noun or use as a verb, and the strength of the discour se bias for each item. The goal was to determine how probabilistic lex ical bias and discourse bias influence the generation and selection of syntactic structure in the ambiguous region, and this was investigate d by varying the length of the ambiguous region in Experiments 2-4. Th e data suggest that only probabilistic lexical bias influenced the gen eration of structure, both lexical bias and discourse bias guided sele ction of the appropriate structure. (C) 1997 Academic Press.