Abstract
Some accounts of syntactic parsing propose that readers and listeners determine a sentence’s syntactic structure in much the same way that they determine the meaning of a word (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994). Namely, they recover information from a mental lexicon that describes what syntactic structures are permissible and preferred. MacDonald et al. note (p. 692), “…recent types of theorizing eliminate the strong distinction between accessing a meaning and constructing a syntactic representation, an idea which was central to previous accounts.” Other accounts of syntactic parsing propose that readers and listeners consult grammatical principles and guide their syntactic structure-building decisions by determining (at least) the lexical categories of the words in the sentence (e.g., Frazier, 1979, 1987; Frazier & Clifton, 1996). In this chapter, we will contrast these different accounts by describing three dimensions on which they differ and by examining their compatibility with the empirical record.
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Traxler, M.J., Pickering, M.J., Clifton, C., van Gompel, R. (2000). Architectures and Mechanisms for Sentence Processing: Is Syntactic Parsing a Form of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution?. In: De Vincenzi, M., Lombardo, V. (eds) Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Language Processing. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3949-6_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3949-6_6
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