Ambiguity resolution in sentence processing: Evidence against frequency-based accounts

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated two frequency-based processing accounts: the serial lexical-guidance account, in which people adopt the an alysis compatible with the most likely subcategorization of a verb; and the serial-likelihood account, in which people adopt the analysis that they wo uld regard as the most likely analysis, given the information available at the point of ambiguity. The results demonstrate that neither of these accou nts explains readers' performance. Instead people preferred to attach noun phrases as arguments of verbs even when such analyses were unlikely to be c orrect. We suggest that these results fit well with a model in which the pr ocessor initially favors informative analyses. (C) 2000 Academic Press.