MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

750 Sentence Processing
(1990), Altmann, Garnham, and Dennis (1992), and others
have highlighted the important influence exerted by DIS-
COURSE context on the process of resolving structural ambiguities.
For example, consider the sentences in (2).
(2) a. The fireman told the woman that he had risked his
life for many people in similar fires.
b. The fireman told the woman that he had risked his life
for to install a smoke detector.
In (2a), the phrase that he had risked his life for many people
in similar fires is an assertion being told to some
woman. In (2b), the phrase that he had risked his life for is a
phrase specifying which woman was being addressed. As in
(1), the sentences here display a temporary ambiguity
between the two structures. Minimal Attachment predicts an
initial preference for the assertion analysis in (2a). Altmann,
Garnham, and Dennis (1992), using the eye-tracking technique,
indeed found a reading-time advantage for sentences
such as (2a) over (2b). But it is significant that they only
found this in particular situations. That is, they found that
the discourse context played an important role in determining
how these sentences were read. Consider the fact that, if
two women are mentioned in a conversation, then the use of
distinguishing modification, as in (2b), would aid the listener
in determining which woman was being referred to in
a particular sentence. By testing sentences in contexts in
which modification was useful in this way, Altmann,
Garnham, and Dennis report that the initial reading time
advantage for (2a) over (2b) disappeared. This indicates the
rapid influence of discourse context on sentence processing.
Studies such as these indicate that sentence processing
necessarily involves the efficient use of many different types
of information. Exactly how these various information types
interact in sentence processing is an important question in
cognitive psychology. Sentence processing is center stage in
the “modularity” debate—that is, the extent to which information
processing is accomplished by specialized subprocessors
or by more general mechanisms (Fodor 1983;
Marslen-Wilson and Tyler 1987; Friederici 1990). In addition
to lexical, structural, and discourse information, the
role of prosodic factors is also an increasing focus of experimental
research (Ferreira and Anes 1994; Warren 1996).
Another important research topic, inspired by the work
of Baddeley and colleagues (Baddeley 1986), is the role of
short-term memory in sentence processing. As noted, the
limited capacity of short-term memory is one driving force
in incremental processing, and many researchers accord it a
significant role in the processing of ambiguous or complex
sentences (Just and Carpenter 1992; Waters and Caplan
1996).
See also AMBIGUITY; CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO
LANGUAGE; PROSODY AND INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES;
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
—Paul Gorrell
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