Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on two types of ambiguity: lexical and syntactic
ambiguity. The two kinds of ambiguity can interact—for example, adopting noun vs. verb …

Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic
ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations …

Publisher Summary A fundamental problem in language comprehension is to obtain an
accurate characterization of lexical processing and of the influence of contextual information …

Two hypotheses concerning the nature of lexical access, the exhaustive access and the
terminating ordered search hypotheses, were examined in two separate studies using a …

Previous models of the computation of word meanings in sentence context have claimed
either that context causes only one meaning of an ambiguous word to be processed or that …

Abstract Models of lexical ambiguity resolution posit a role for context, but this construct has
remained relatively undefined in the literature. The present study isolated two different forms …

The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution was explored in two self-paced
reading studies of ambiguous reduced relative clauses. Recent constraint-based models of …

The process of comprehending sentences involves the integration of a variety of different
information sources, constrained by the available computational resources. This paper …

A number of sentence comprehension models have been developed over the past 30 years
or so. Many of these have been aimed at the central issue of explain ing how people resolve …

Natural languages contain probabilistic constraints that influence the resolution of
ambiguities. Current models of sentence processing agree that probabilistic constraints …