The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution

Abstract

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. © 1996 Academic Press, Inc.