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Late closure in context

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 18:12 authored by Gerry T M Altmann, Kathy Y van Nice, Alan GarnhamAlan Garnham, Judith-Ann Henstra
The debate surrounding the use of extra-sentential context to inform early parsing decisions has focused primarily on the class of syntactic ambiguity to which Minimal Attachment (Frazier, 1979) applies. The present paper extends the debate to Late Closure (Frazier, 1979). We argue that Crain and Steedman's (1985) Principle of Parsimony predicts a specific circumstance in which referential context should override the tendency for late closure or right association (Kimball, 1973). The first of four eye-movement reading time studies failed to confirm the prediction. However, when similar materials were embedded in a context which explicitly directed attention toward the appropriate predicate (i.e., the predicate associated with the high attachment), we found evidence of contextual override. We argue that the data fit well with the constraint-satisfaction view of sentence processing (e.g., MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994), although we offer an augmentation of the account based on thepredictiveactivation of forthcoming structure (cf. Elman, 1990).

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Journal of Memory and Language

ISSN

0749596X

Publisher

Journal of Memory and Language

Issue

4

Volume

38

Page range

459-484

ISBN

0749596X

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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