{"pk":31322,"title":"Plausibility and Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Different theories of human syntactic parsing make conflicting claims concerning the role of non-syntactic information (e.g. semantics, real world knowledge) on on-line parsing. W e address this debate by examining the effect of plausibility of thematic role assignments on the processing of syntactic ambiguities. In a selfpaced reading experiment, ambiguous condition reading times were longer than unambiguous condition times at the point of syntactic disambiguation only when plausibility cues had supported the incorrect interpretation. Off-line measures of plausibility also predicted reading time effects in regression analyses. These results indicate that plausibility information m ay influence thematic role assignment and the initial interpretation of a syntactic ambiguity, and they argue against parsing models in which the syntactic component is blind to plausibility information.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20n446wt","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Neal","middle_name":"J.","last_name":"Pealmutter","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Maryellen","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"MacDonald","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1992-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/31322/galley/22391/download/"}]}