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The Role of Lexical Frequency in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution
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The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two self-paced reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. Recent constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution have proposed that for a reduced relative clause (e.g., “The room searched by the police was . . .”), both the participle and past tense forms of the ambiguous verb (“searched”) are made available in parallel and that local syntactic and semantic information are used to resolve the ambiguity within a parallel constraint-satisfaction process (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994a; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994). A crucial prediction of these models is that the frequency with which the verb is used as a participle form in the language should affect a reader's ability to consider the relative clause alternative. This prediction was confirmed in two self-paced reading experiments that directly manipulated participle frequency while controlling for the degree of contextual constraint. Implications for constraint-based lexicalist accounts of sentence comprehension are discussed.
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“Thus, the ambiguityis stronglyconstrained bythe frequencywith which the ambiguous verb occurs in transitive and passive structures, of which reduced relative clauses are a special type (MacDonald, 1994; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell, 1996).”
From FREQUENCY EFFECTS IN LANGUAGE PROCESSING: A Review with Implications for Theories of Implicit and Explicit Language Acquisition (2002) · cites this paper as Trueswell, 1996
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Metadata
- Authors
- Trueswell, J. C.
- Affiliations
- University of Pennsylvania (US)
- Corresponding author
- Trueswell, John C.
- ORCID
- Trueswell, John C.
- Venue
- Journal of Memory and Language
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 1996-08
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 566-585
- ISSN
- 0749-596X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2087315543
- Cited by
- 277
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 26 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 9 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 7.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Memory and Language (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
- Keywords
- word frequency, syntactic ambiguity resolution, reduced relative clauses, constraint-based modeling, constraint satisfaction, sentence comprehension, self-paced reading, verb forms
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