ABSTRACT
It is by now a commonplace observation that many sentences occurring in natural language are at least temporarily ambiguous between more than one interpretation. Given that language comprehension takes place in a rapid and incremental fashion, such that the sentence processor attempts to integrate each word into a partially constructed interpretation, an important focus of research is to specify the mechanisms by which the processing system decides on an analysis at a point in time when the input is compatible with multiple interpretations. Recent work in sentence processing has identified a variety of sources of information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, which could in principle be used in the resolution of ambiguity. Existing proposals differ with respect to when various sources of information become available to the parser, and the manner in which they interact. In this chapter, we focus on one particular ambiguous construction as a case study for evaluating the nature of the contribution of various information sources in the process of comprehending structurally ambiguous sentences. Although the discussion and the experiments we report are centered on the ambiguous attachment of prepositional phrases (PPs), we assume that the mechanisms under discussion are of a general nature and are involved in a variety of different structural ambiguities.
