Limited syntactic parallelism in Chineseambiguity resolution

摘要

Using the stop-making-sense paradigm (Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, &Carlsen, 1995) and eye-tracking durinreading, we examined the processingof the Chinese Verb NP_1de NP_2construction, which is temporarilyambiguous between a complement clause (CC) analysis and a relative clause(RC) analysis. Resolving the ambiguity as the more complex, less preferredCC was costly under some conditions but not under others. We took this asevidence for a limited parallel processor, such as Tabor and Hutchins' (2004)SOPARSE, that maintains multiple syntactic analyses across several words ofa sentence when the structures are each supported by the availableconstraints.