Abstract Garden Path Sentences and Morphological Frequency Biases

Recent work on the nature of syntactic ambiguity has focused on the properties of lexical items that may be relevant to resolving such ambiguities. A variety of lexical properties have been proposed as having significant influence on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Ranging from referential properties (Ni, Crain, & Shankweiler 1996), in the context of the Referential Model of language processing, to subcategorization properties and frequencies associated with morphological variants of particular verbs (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenburg 1994), in the context of a constraint-based approach to processing. The present eye-movement study provides empirical support for the claim of MacDonald et al. that relative frequencies of simple past tense versus past participle forms of regularly inflected verbs influence parsing decisions made when such verbs are encountered in sentences exhibiting a reduced-relative clause/main-verb ambiguity. However, this paper challenges the MacDonald et al. theoretical claim that the existence of such effects poses a serious challenge to modular models of language processing as a class, and provides an account of such effects within the Referential Model of language processing. In this account the effect of frequency bias on parsing decisions is argued to reduce to an effect of frequency on lexical access latency.