Parsing arguments: Phrase structure and argument structure as determinants of initial parsing decisions

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Two experiments measured reading times for sentences with prepositional phrases whose syntactic analyses were disambiguated by plausibility considerations (e.g., “The saleswoman tried to interest the man in the wallet during the storewide sale” vs. “The saleswoman tried to interest the man in his fifties during the storewide sale.”) Reading times immediately upon encountering the disambiguating information were faster when the prepositional phrase modified a verb than when it modified a noun, suggesting an initial preference for the former analysis. However, reading times later in the sentence were faster when the prepositional phrase was a syntactic argument rather than a syntactic adjunct of whatever word it modified, suggesting a final preference for arguments over adjuncts. The results were discussed in terms of their implications for theories of parsing that claim initial decisions are made on the basis of information about the part of speech of words together with phrase structure rules, and for theories of parsing that claim that the specific syntactic frames associated with individual lexical items guide parsing.