TY - JOUR
T1 - Why is that? Structural prediction and ambiguity resolution in a very large corpus of English sentences
AU - Roland, Douglas
AU - Elman, Jeffrey L.
AU - Ferreira, Victor S.
N1 - Funding Information:
&z.star;This research was funded by NIH/NIDCD5T32DC00041, NIH/NIMHR01-MH60517, and NIH/NIMHR01-MH64733.
PY - 2006/1
Y1 - 2006/1
N2 - Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in conjunction with data from the British National Corpus to measure the amount and specificity of the information available for disambiguation in natural language use. We examine the Direct Object/Sentential Complement ambiguity and the closely related issue of complementizer use in sentential complements, and find that both ambiguity resolution and complementizer use can be predicted from contextual information.
AB - Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in conjunction with data from the British National Corpus to measure the amount and specificity of the information available for disambiguation in natural language use. We examine the Direct Object/Sentential Complement ambiguity and the closely related issue of complementizer use in sentential complements, and find that both ambiguity resolution and complementizer use can be predicted from contextual information.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.11.008
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.11.008
M3 - Article
C2 - 16399264
AN - SCOPUS:30044437820
VL - 98
SP - 245
EP - 272
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
SN - 0010-0277
IS - 3
ER -