Limited syntactic parallelism in Chinese ambiguity resolution

作者:Hsieh Yufen*; Boland Julie E; Zhang Yaxu; Yan Ming
来源:Language and Cognitive Processes, 2009, 24(7-8): 1227-1264.
DOI:10.1080/01690960802050375

摘要

Using the stop-making-sense paradigm (Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlsen, 1995) and eye-tracking during reading, we examined the processing of the Chinese Verb NP1 de NP2 construction, which is temporarily ambiguous between a complement clause (CC) analysis and a relative clause (RC) analysis. Resolving the ambiguity as the more complex, less preferred CC was costly under some conditions but not under others. We took this as evidence for a limited parallel processor, such as Tabor and Hutchins' (2004) SOPARSE, that maintains multiple syntactic analyses across several words of a sentence when the structures are each supported by the available constraints.