Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

In Chinese language, there are some disyllable words, which are temporarily and syntactically ambiguous between noun and verb when being embedded in sentences. They are called words with syntactic ambiguities (WWSAs). Both high-noun-biased WWSAs (H-WWSAs) and low-noun-biased ones (L-WWSAs) were included in the present study for investigating their parsing processes and testing the theories of sentence processing. Thirty-six undergraduate students were asked to read sentences word-by-word as quickly as possible, without sacrificing their comprehension of each sentence. It was found that there was no significant difference of reading time between WWSAs and their control words, which was inconsistent with the prediction of the delay model that proposed that during the delay period at the onset of the ambiguity, very little analysis of the ambiguity takes place. It was also found that compared with their own control words respectively, L-WWSAs led to the longer reading time at two (i.e., the first and the third) regions of disambiguity, while H-WWSAs led to the longer reading time at three (i.e., from the first and the third) regions of disambiguity. These results showed that greater garden-path effects occurred for the H-WWSAs than for the L-WWSAs. Thus, the assigning processes of syntactic roles of WWSAs were influenced by their degree of noun biasing, which is predicted by the constraint satisfaction theory, but not by the garden-path model. In addition, subjects assigned the syntactic roles of noun even for L-WWSAs. It indicated that the parsing of WWSAs can be guided by the minimal attachment principle proposed by the garden-path model, when the degree of noun biasing of WWSAs cannot provide any constraining cues for the resolution of syntactic ambiguities. All these results suggest that neither the constraint satisfaction theory nor the garden-path model can explain the parsing processes of WWSAs very well. Alternatively, readers may assign specific syntactic roles for WWSAs immediately, either by accessing probabilistic constrains information or by accessing specific parsing principles, depending on the strength of probabilistic constrains.

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