Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

and disposes the wrong one as soon as it reaches the point at which the ambiguity is
resolved (Gibson, 1991, Gorrell, 1989, Hickok, 1993).
However, in parallel processing models some interpretations might be favorable; in other
words, the parser does not treat all choices equally – if that is not assumed, these models
would be falsified easily. There are two types of parallel processing models: competition
and non-competition. The difference is in the influence of the preferred choice for
sentence interpretation on the other possible choices. Competition models claim that there
is such an influence that renders non-preferred choices less likely; i.e. that possible
choices for sentence interpretation compete. In the non-competition models there is no
such influence.
Serial models are further divided into deterministic (e.g. Frazier & Clifton, 1996, Frazier
& Rainer, 1982) and probabilistic (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990, Jurafsky, 2002)
depending on how the initial choice of the parsing procedure is selected. In deterministic
models the parser always selects the same interpretation for an ambiguity in the sentence.
For example, locality is an important constraint that guides the parsing procedure in
deterministic models; it causes a preference for the interpretation with the local
attachment over the interpretation with less local attachment. In the sentence
(5) The bartender told the detective that the suspect left the country yesterday.
(Example taken from Gibson & Pearlmutter, 1998)
the adverb yesterday is attached to the local clause the suspect left the country rather than
the less local main verb told. In probabilistic models the parser will choose the most
26