Schizophrenics’ difficulties in understanding ambiguous sentences

This study investigates the way adult second language learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their L1 participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of the above type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. While the learners' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical-semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent NPs (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they were applying any phrase-structure based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners' performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6 to 7 year-old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study (Felser, Marinis, & Clahsen, submitted) in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all.

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1982

Previous research has identified three distinct forms of linguistic ambiguity: lexical, surface structural, and deep structural. Cummins and Das (1978) studied these forms of ambiguity in the context of Das, Kirby and Jarman's (1979) model of simultaneous and successive processing, and demonstrated that comprehension of lexical ambiguity depended upon simultaneous processing, while that of surface and deep structural ambiguity depended upon successive processing. The present study investigated the relationship between these cognitive and linguistic processes in a group of older children. The subjects' level of English achievement was also considered. The results showed that comprehension of all three forms of ambiguity was strongly related to level of English achievement, though deep structure ambiguities best descriminated the English achievement groups. Results also showed that perception of all types of ambiguity was related to both simultaneous and successive processing. Subjects with high successive processing scores had an additional advantage in perceiving deep structure ambiguities. These results suggest the need for an elaboration of the Cummins and Das cognitive process model of linguistic processes, demonstrating that a variety of task variables can alter the cognitive processes required in performance of linguistic tasks. This study was supported by an Australian Research Grants Committee grant to J. B. Biggs and the author.

Journal of Memory and Language, 1987

This study was originally presented as a Masters thesis by J. Warner, under the direction of A. Glass, whom he thanks along with the other members of his committee-Patricia Gildea and Elliot Noma-for their valuable suggestions, incisive criticism, and enthusiasm.

2019

Successful language comprehension requires the ability to efficiently recover from processing difficulties. For example, sentences with lexically ambiguous words that are disambiguated to an unexpected meaning (The ball was crowded) require the detection of a violation to meaning coherence (crowded), and the resolution of this violation by accessing and integrating a secondary meaning of the ambiguous word (“dancing event”) into the sentence context. Although findings of group-level processing difficulty associated with such violation detection and resolution processes are of theoretical interest, individual differences in the recovery from processing difficulty are of greater practical relevance. Even adult readers vary considerably in their “lexical expertise”, their experience with written material and knowledge of word forms and meanings. The present study related the lexical expertise of 96 adult readers to their ability to detect and resolve coherence violations on-line and of...

Brain and language, 2003

Spoken language comprehension requires rapid integration of information from multiple linguistic sources. In the present study we addressed the temporal aspects of this integration process by focusing on the time course of the selection of the appropriate meaning of lexical ambiguities (''bank'') in sentence contexts. Successful selection of the contextually appropriate meaning of the ambiguous word is dependent upon the rapid binding of the contextual information in the sentence to the appropriate meaning of the ambiguity. We used the N400 to identify the time course of this binding process. The N400 was measured to target words that followed three types of context sentences. In the concordant context, the sentence biased the meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous word so that it was related to the target. In the discordant context, the sentence context biased the meaning so that it was not related to the target. In the unrelated control condition, the sentences ended in an unambiguous noun that was unrelated to the target. Half of the concordant sentences biased the dominant meaning, and the other half biased the subordinate meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous words. The ISI between onset of the target word and offset of the sentence-final word of the context sentence was 100 ms in one version of the experiment, and 1250 ms in the second version. We found that (i) the lexically dominant meaning is always partly activated, independent of context, (ii) initially both dominant and subordinate meaning are (partly) activated, which suggests that contextual and lexical factors both contribute to sentence interpretation without context completely overriding lexical information, and (iii) strong lexical influences remain present for a relatively long period of time.

Canadian Journal of …, 1993

1983

Studies comparing lexical, surface-, and deep-structure types of ambiguous sentences with unambiguous ones for perceptual complexity show conflicting findings mainly because of task artifacts and lack of adequate control of confounding variables. In the present study, three types of ambiguous sentences and matched unambiguous controls were compared. Acceleration and deceleration measures of heart rate (HR) were used since these have been shown to reliably indicate complexity of cognitive activity. The study used a Groups x Ambiguity Condition x Ambiguous Sentence-Type x Sentence-Clusters repeated measures Latin Square ANOVA design which permitted isolation of variance related to the specific sample of sentences used. Eighteen low-bias ambiguous sentences (six from each type) and their control pairs, divided into three lists, were presented to 30 male undergraduates. Analysis of data showed: (1) significant Ambiguity x Type and Ambiguity effects for the percentage of increase in HR during processing of the sentence and, (2) significant effect of Ambiguity for the percentage of decrease in HR. These results were interpreted as showing that while low,bias ambiguous sentences are perceptually more complex than unambiguous ones, the effect of ambiguity may be greater for deep-structure type of ambiguous sentences than for lexical and surface-structure types. l This report is based on the author's doctoral dissertation at the University of Alberta. Thanks are due to Drs.

Memory & Cognition, 2002

Journal of Memory and Language, 2001

Three experiments were conducted to assess the impact of the thematic fit and discourse context on the processing of sentences that were initially syntactically ambiguous between main verb and reduced relative constructions. Specifically, we tested a strong version of a constraint satisfaction position that suggests that thematic fit and context should produce a garden path effect on a simple, main verb construction. Across three experiments we observed garden path effects for reduced relative target sentences in first-pass reading-time measures, but similar effects for main verb sentences did not occur despite the thematic fit information and discourse contexts which were biased toward the reduced relative reading. The pattern of results is consistent with the predictions of the garden path theory.

Memory & Cognition, 1998

Cognitive Psychology, 1982

Eye movements were recorded as subjects read sentences containing temporary structural ambiguities. In accord with the garden-path theory of sentence comprehension, shorter reading times were found for sentences conforming to certain independently motivated parsing strategies (late closure and minimal attachment) than for comparable sentences which violate these strategies. Further, longer fixation durations were associated with the very first fixation in the region of the sentence which disambiguated the sentence, suggesting that the human sentence-parsing mechanism operates in a rather systematic fashion, immediately computing the structural consequences of fixated material for the analysis of preceding material. The pattern of regressive eye movements did not conform to the view that the parsing mechanism automatically returns to the beginning of the sentence to revise an incorrect analysis of linguistic material nor did it support the view that the parsing mechanism systematically backtracks through the sentence until the source of the erroneous analysis is located. Rather, the pattern of regressions indicated that the parsing mechanism typically engages in selective reanalysis, exploiting whatever information it has available about the type of error it has committed to guide its reanalysis attempts. Finally, it is emphasized that an understanding of the parser's revision procedures is essential to an explanation of why certain linguistic structures cannot be successfully parsed by humans.

Applied Psycholinguistics, 2003

This study investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their first language participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. Although the learners' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical–semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent noun phrases (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners' performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6- to 7-year-old monolingua...

Lingua Cultura, 2007

A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The ambiguity, however, can be noticed if one really has a linguistic knowledge on how to analyze the phrase or sentence. Of the two kinds of ambiguity, lexical and structural, the latter is the one which is explored further in this paper. Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure. The phrase can be disambiguated by putting it in a sentence with some sort of formal signals which help the reader or hearer to recognize the sentence structure. Some of the signals include function words, inflections, affixes, stress, juncture, and punctuation. The rest of this paper discusses some types of structural ambiguity, how they differ, and some possible ways to resolve them.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2000

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated two frequency-based processing accounts: the serial lexical-guidance account, in which people adopt the analysis compatible with the most likely subcategorization of a verb; and the serial-likelihood account, in which people adopt the analysis that they would regard as the most likely analysis, given the information available at the point of ambiguity. The results demonstrate that neither of these accounts explains readers' performance. Instead people preferred to attach noun phrases as arguments of verbs even when such analyses were unlikely to be correct. We suggest that these results fit well with a model in which the processor initially favors informative analyses.