Psycholinguistics
Homework #2: Due Friday, August 14th
1. Give an example of a sentence that contains a lexical ambiguity, a sentence that
contains a local syntactic ambiguity, and a sentence that contains a global syntactic
ambiguity. Don’t use example sentences from the lecture. Your examples may be in
either English or Chinese, but the explanation should be in English. For each sentence,
explain the nature of the ambiguity. (For example, give the alternative structures for the
globally ambiguous sentence.)
2. A garden path sentence contains a local syntactic ambiguity that is later disambiguated
in the dispreferred direction. For example:
The horse raced past the barn…fell.
The first part is ambiguous between a main clause and an NP modified by a relative
clause (as in “The horse that was raced”). People usually adopt the main clause structure,
and in fact, may not be able to recover the relative clause structure when it becomes
necessary at “fell”. There are many reasons why people adopt the main clause structure
during the ambiguous region:
(a) the verb more frequently occurs in the past tense than the past participle form
(b) horses are very good subjects (Agents) of the verb “race”
(c) main clauses are simpler and more common than relative clauses
(d) the relative clause interpretation assumes that there are multiple horses in the
discourse model, one of which has raced past the barn, whereas the main clause
interpretation makes no such assumptions.
The same ambiguity exists in the following sentence, but it’s easier to get the right
analysis because flowers can’t do the watering:
The flowers watered by the neighbor…died anyway.
Come up with your own garden path sentence, either in English or in Chinese. Explain
why you think people tend to adopt the wrong analysis during the ambiguous region. If
you can, give an example of a difficult garden path sentence (like The horse…) and one
that is easier (like The flowers…) and explain why they differ in ease of comprehension.
3 A lot of psycholinguistic research concerns ambiguity resolution. Examples include the
lexical bias effect in speech perception, lexical ambiguity resolution, and syntactic
ambiguity resolution. Why is there so much interest in ambiguity? For investigating what
kinds of theoretical questions are ambiguous stimuli useful?