Parsing in discourse: Context effects and their limits

Abstract

Can discourse context override syntactic parsing preferences? This question is important for models that assume an autonomous syntax. Three experiments addressed this question by embedding two different types of garden path sentences in biasing contexts. For sentences with postnominal prepositional phrases (PP) such as The boy hit the girl with the boomerang/smile we found context override of the preference to attach the PP high to the verb. This result was obtained both in self-paced reading (Experiments 1 & 3) and in an eye-movement study (Experiment 2). By contrast, sentences with reduced relatives such as The coffee spilled on the rug was difficult for her to conceal produced longer reading times than control sentences even in context (Experiment 3). The selectivity of context override requires a model of parsing sensitive to differences among syntactic structures. One such model (The Cooperative Language Processor) is discussed in light of these results.