In two self-paced reading experiments, subject relative clauses (e.g., 'the woman who saw the man') were read faster than object relative clauses ('the woman who the man saw') in Japanese. Previous formulations of working-memory factors do not predict the patterns observed. A preference to complete fragments as object relative clauses indicates that ambiguity and expectation are unlikely to exp...

Indefinites in intensional contexts, such as attitude reports or intensional argument positions, give rise to a well-known ambiguity. Consider (1): On the so-called specific reading, it says that there is a particular object which happens to be a jacket like Malte’s jacket such that Adrian wants to buy that particular object. Adrian need not know that that object is a jacket like Malte’s. On th...

Despite numerous studies investigating whether semantic representations are involved in the process of reading aloud, the issue remains controversial. While some studies report significant effects of semantic variables on this task (e.g., Fera, Joordens, Balota, Ferraro, & Besner, 1992; Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995), other studies have highlighted possible problems with these studies (...

Most insurance companies publish few data on the occurrence and detection of insurance fraud. This stands in contrast to the previous literature on costly state verification, which has shown that it is optimal to commit to an auditing strategy, as the credible announcement of thoroughly auditing claim reports might act as a powerful deterrent. We show that uncertainty about fraud detection can ...

This paper presents experimental results that elucidate some aspects of semantic processing, i.e. of the system that allows perceivers to associate an interpretation to a sentence on-line. The phenomenon under investigation is the resolution of quantifier scope ambiguities. Sentences containing multiple quantifiers (i.e. everybody, some musician, etc.) are known to give rise to several interpre...

Bare numerals present an interesting challenge to formal semantics and pragmatics: they seem to be compatible between various readings (‘at least’, ‘exactly’, and ‘at most’ readings), and the choice of a particular reading seems to depend on complex interactions between contextual factors and linguistic structure. The goal of this article is to present and discuss some of the current approaches...

A Working Paper is the author's intellectual property. It is intended as a means to promote research to interested readers. Its content should not be copied or hosted on any server without written permission from publications. We model a common pool resource game under environmental uncertainty. A symmetric group of individuals face the dilemma of sharing a common resource: each player chooses ...

In this article, we investigate ambiguity in syntactic annotation. The ambiguity in question is inherent in a way that even human annotators interpret the meaning differently. In our experiment, we detect potential structurally ambiguous sentences with Constraint Grammar rules. In the linguistic phenomena we investigate, structural ambiguity is primarily caused by word order. The potentially am...

Let W (ψ; x, y) be the wideband ambiguity function. It is obtained in this note that y− α+2 2 W (ψ;x, y)(α > −1) is SO(2)-invariant if and only if the Fourier transform of ψ is a Laguerre function.