Mode of Disambiguation and Garden-Path Strength: An Investigation of Subject-Object Ambiguities in German

Abstract

The results of three experiments are reported which investigated the processing of locally ambiguous object-subject sentences in German. These sentences are known to elicit garden-path effects because the parser initially prefers the assignment of a subject-object structure (e.g., Schriefers, Friederici, Kühn, 1995). The aim of the experiments was to test whether the type of grammatical information that signals the garden-path (the mode of disambiguation)has an impact on how difficult it is to arrive at the correct structural assignment. We exploited the fact that subject-object ambiguities in German can be disambiguated in two different ways: by agreement or by case. If disambiguation concerning the relative order of subject and object is provided by the number features of the finite verb (agreement disambiguation) a robust garden-path effect results. In contrast, if the disambiguating information is provided by a second NP morphologically marked for nominative, the resulting garden-path effect is weak. This finding poses difficulty for models of reanalysis which relate garden-path strength to revision cost because the revision operations necessary to transform the subject-object structure initially computed into an object-subject structure are the same for both modes of disambiguation.Our results show that different modes of disambiguation can be more or less effective in signaling how to come out of the garden-path, a conclusionin accordance with the diagnosis model of reanalysis as first proposed in Fodor and Inoue (1994).

Keywords

German reanalysis sentence parsing

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