In an ERP study, German sentences were investigated that contain a case-ambiguous NP that may be assigned accusative or dative case. Sentences were disambiguated by the verb in final position of the sentence. As our data show, sentences ending in a verb that assigns dative case to the ambiguous NP elicit a clear garden-path effect. The garden-path effect was indicated by a broad centro-posterio...

While the P600 is generally presumed to be a uniform response elicited consistently across individuals in specific syntactic contexts, Tanner and Van Hell (2014) showed evidence of distinct response profiles (N400 or P600 dominant) for syntactic violations across individuals. The current analysis used Tanner and Van Hell’s response-dominance index (RDI) to examine the impact of response dominan...

This paper discusses the computational parsing of GP sentences. By an approach of combining computational linguistic methods, e.g. CFG, ATN and BNF, we analyze the various syntactic structures of pre-grammatical, common, ambiguous and GP sentences. The evidence shows both ambiguous and GP sentences have lexical or syntactic crossings. Any choice of the crossing in ambiguous sentences can bring ...

unlike the languages we know, some of the arabic sentences form without any verbs. arab grammarians call these sentences, which contain a subject and a predicate without any linking verbs, nominal sentences. examining theses sentences indicates that their predicate is composed of one of the following words or structures: 1. noun, 2. prepositional phrase, 3. an adverb of time or place, 4. a nomi...

While previous research has shown that working memory capacity (WMC) predicts sentence processing ability, the understanding of the relationship is limited as almost all studies have used the reading span task as their sole measure of WMC. The current study examined how the effects of garden-path sentences and filler-gap dependencies (as indexed by the P600) related to four measures of working ...

Using a forced-choice question-answering paradigm, K. Christianson, A. Hollingworth, J. F. Halliwell, and F. Ferreira (2001) showed that the original misinterpretation built during the analysis of a garden-path sentence lingers even after reanalysis has occurred. However, their methodology has been questioned (R. P. G. van Gompel, M. J. Pickering, J. Pearson, & G. Jacob, 2006). In this study, t...

Speakers should be motivated to produce easy-to-understand sentences, but they must successfully say sentences that are harder to produce. Four experiments assessed how verb bias influences the mention of the optional "that" in sentence-complement structures. Without the "that", such sentences can be incorrectly interpreted as including direct objects (garden paths), and especially so after dir...

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...

Although there has been some speculation concerning the role played by punctuation in parsing, there has been amazingly little empirical investigation of the issue. Punctuation appears to be a widely neglected topic. For the most part, where punctuation has been included in parsing studies, investigators have simply assumed that punctuation, such as commas, can be used to effectively disambigua...