Context effects in syntactic ambiguity resolution: Discourse and semantic influences in parsing reduced relative clauses.

Abstract

This article examines how certain types of semantic and discourse context affect the processing of relative clauses which are temporarily ambiguous between a relative clause and a main clause (e.g., "The actress selected by the director ..."). We review recent results investigating local semantic context and temporal context, and we present some new data investigating referential contexts. The set of studies demonstrate that, contrary to many recent claims in the literature, all of these types of context can have early effects on syntactic, ambiguity resolution during on-line reading comprehension. These results are discussed within a "constraint-based" framework for ambiguity resolution in which effects of context are determined by the strength and relevance of the contextual constraint and by the availability of the syntactic alternatives.