Lexical chunking effects in syntactic processing

Artikel

Research on syntactic ambiguity resolution in language comprehension has shown that subjects' processing decisions are influenced by a variety of heterogeneous factors such as e.g., syntactic complexity, semantic fit and the discourse frequency of the competing structures. The present paper investigates a further potentially relevant factor in such processes: effects of syntagmatic lexical chunking (or matching to a complex memorized prefab) whose occurrence would be predicted from usage-based assumptions about linguistic categorisation. Focusing on the widely studied so-called DO/SC-ambiguity in which a post-verbal NP is syntactically ambiguous between a direct object and the subject of an embedded clause, potentially biasing collocational chunks of the relevant type are identified in a number of corpus-linguistic pretests and then investigated in a self-paced reading experiment. The results show a significant increase in processing difficulty from a collocationally neutral over a lexically biasing to a strongly biasing condition. This suggests that syntagmatically complex and partially schematic templates of the kind envisioned in usage-based Construction Grammar may impinge on speakers' online processing decisions during sentence comprehension.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Klassifikation und Themen

• Thema: Funktionale Grammatik ; Disambiguierung ; Kollokation ; Englisch ; Germanische Sprachen; Deutsch

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Zeschel, Arne
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Berlin (u.a.) : de Gruyter
• (wann): 2015-06-19

Weitere Informationen

• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-37765
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 06.03.2025, 09:00 MEZ