Interactions of meaning and syntax: Implications for models of sentence comprehension

Abstract

A reduced relative—main clause ambiguity occurs in sentences that begin with reduced relative clauses, as in The hangman executed by the government was convicted of treason. This ambiguity has often been the focus of research designed to investigate the processes by which syntactic structures are built during sentence comprehension. Reading time differences between more difficult and less difficult reduced relative sentences (e.g., The hangman executed by the government was convicted of treason vs. The martyr executed by the government was convicted of treason) have been interpreted as reflecting syntactic disambiguation processes. In this article, we point out that there exists a possible alternative interpretation of the differences, namely, that reading times are longer for the more difficult sentences because the information in their relative clauses mismatches a reader’s general knowledge of how events typically occur in the world or how they are typically referenced in discourse. Under this interpretation, the differences in reading times do not have their bases in disambiguation processing.