ABSTRACT
Subjects were presented with strongly past-participle biased sentences such as, The portrait sketched by the tree was very beautiful, in a self-paced reading time task. Sentences were displayed two words at a time, (e.g., The portrait /sketched by …) so that the verb and the disambiguating preposition were read together. In Experiment 1, a set of materials constructed to minimize the past-tense bias with an inanimate NP was compared with a less constraining set of sentences. The syntactic gardenpath usually associated with the reduced-relative construction was not present with the more constraining materials, but was with the less constraining NP sentences. In Experiment 2, using only the more constraining materials, preposition length was manipulated so that subjects read sentences with both short (i.e., by) and long (i.e., underneath) prepositions. No syntactic gardenpaths occurred with sentences with the past-participle bias and short prepositions; however, when the same sentences were read with the long prepositions, the syntactic gardenpath was present. This result is inconsistent with a deterministic parser. We expand on our previous proposals that the parser must be able to take into account both semantic and verb-form information, as well as, the amount of disambiguating information (in the form of a preposition) that can be integrated with the ambiguous verb.
