This paper investigates whether surprisal theory can account for differential processing difficulty in the NP-/S-coordination ambiguity in Dutch. Surprisal is estimated using a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG), which is induced from an automatically annotated corpus. We find that our lexicalized surprisal model can account for the reading time data from a classic experiment on this amb...

This paper reports the results of a lexical decision experiment and a selfpaced reading experiment that investigate the interaction between syntactic and lexical information in on-line language processing, using the noun-verb ambiguity in English. The results of both experiments provide support for the hypothesis whereby syntactic and lexical information are two independent factors in the proce...

Bare numerals (e.g. two) seem to be ambiguous between two readings: the exactly and the at least reading. We present an ERP study that explores this issue. We show that the pattern of the ERPs elicited by critical nouns in sentences with unembedded bare numerals depends on the participant’s choice of the reading of the numeral. For those responders who consistently apply the exactly reading in ...

creates two interpretations. On one reading, the temporal adjective modifies the common noun (N-modifying reading). On the other, it modifies the possession relation (POSS-modifying reading). An explanation for this behavior is offered that appeals to what occurs in possessive sentences like John has a former car (N-modifying reading) and John formerly had a car (POSS-modifying reading). In the...

I many circumstances, evaluations are based on empirical data. However, some observations may be imprecise, meaning that it is not entirely clear what occurred in them. We address the question of how beliefs are formed in these situations. The individual in our model is essentially a “frequentist.” He first makes a subjective judgment about the occurrence of the event for each imprecise observa...

Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland It has often been observed that sentences such as (1) are ambiguous: (1) Mary has lived in Amsterdam for three years. Sentence (1) has a reading in which there is some three-year interval in the past during which Mary lived in Amsterdam, and a reading in which Mary lives in Amsterdam at speech time and has done so for the three years preceding speech time. I will argu...