{"pk":24871,"title":"Thematic considerations in the processing of local ambiguities: Evidence from Hebrew","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p>In three forced-choice completion experiments in Hebrew, the present study investigates the degree to which attachment decisions in sentences with local ambiguity are driven by the goal to maximize interpretation during incremental processing. In particular, we examine a processing strategy aimed at thematic assignment maximization proposed by Pritchett (1988, 1992): at every point during processing, the Theta Criterion attempts to be satisfied, given the maximal thematic grid of the available verbs. We find a consistent preference for attaching a noun phrase to a preceding verb over attaching it as the subject of a yet-unmentioned verb, in accord with thematic assignment maximization and in line with previous observations. In contrast, when two possible verbs were available before the noun phrase, no consistent attachment preference was observed. This points to a prominent role for thematic assignment in ambiguity resolution. In addition, transitivity bias was found to affect processing choices in the latter case, but not in the former. Finally, we show that local thematic assignment maximization can even override global grammaticality.</p>","language":"eng","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[],"section":"Regular Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/05t0n30m","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Lola","middle_name":"","last_name":"Karsenti","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tel Aviv University","department":"Linguistics"},{"first_name":"Aya","middle_name":"","last_name":"Meltzer-Asscher","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tel Aviv University","department":"Linguistics"}],"date_submitted":"2024-06-17T09:21:38.567000-04:00","date_accepted":"2024-12-16T09:54:28.596000-05:00","date_published":"2025-02-18T09:00:00-05:00","render_galley":{"label":"XML","type":"xml","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/24871/galley/31585/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/24871/galley/31584/download/"},{"label":"XML","type":"xml","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/glossapsycholinguistics/article/24871/galley/31585/download/"}]}