On Choosing the Parse with the Scene: The Role of Visual Context and Verb bias in Ambiguity Resolution
Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature.First, whereas adult reading studies indicate an important role for verb biases in the initial consideration of syntactic alternatives (Britt, 1994), studies of adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies suggest an almost exclusive role for referential cues in determining initial syntactic choices (Tanenhaus et al., 1995).Second, in contrast to adults, children in similar listening studies fail to take into account this referential information and instead appear to rely exclusively on verb biases or perhaps syntactically-based parsing principles (Trueswell et al., 1999).The current paper seeks to understand better these surprising contrasts by fully crossing verb bias and referential manipulations within a single experimental design, while using the eye-gaze listening technique.The full pattern is examined in adults (Exp. 1) and children (Exp.2).Results indicate that adults combine both verb bias and referential information to determine syntactic choice, but children rely exclusively on verb bias.We discuss the implications for current theories of sentence processing as well as prior interpretations of world-situated listening studies.
Authors: Jesse Snedeker, Kirsten Thorpe, John C. Trueswell
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2776418650