Cheryl Frenck-Mestre and Joel Pynte

RESOLVING SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITIES:

CROSS-LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES?

The present study is an attempt to discover some of the factors

which influence readers' comprehension when faced with several
possible interpretations of a sentence, and whether any universal
account can be postulated for this process across, if not all, at
least closely related languages. This issue has indeed been the
object of considerable debate (cf. Cuetos, Mitchell & Corely,
1996; Frazier & Clifton, 1996; Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-
Gonzales & Hickok, 1996, MacDonald, Pearlmutter &
Seidenberg, 1994; for recent discussions).
One unquestionable fact is that the human language processor
(HLP) is rapid, so rapid that, more often than not, the reader is
not cognizant of the ambiguity inherent in many common
structures, as exemplified in the English sentence "John said he
took the trash out yesterday." This fact has led to the supposition
that the HLP has at its disposal immediate procedures which
allow it to make decisions based on "minimal" information and
without necessary recourse to semantic or pragmatic factors.
Moreover, in the specific instance of local syntactic ambiguities,
decisions may be made in the absence of this extra-structural
information.
Given this capacity, the immediate question is, what are the
procedures that allow such efficiency? By one account, the
AHLP obeys heuristic structural principles in order to analyse
incoming information quickly (Frazier & Clifton, 1996; Frazier,
1987; 1989; 1990). The proposal is far reaching in that these
119
M. De Vincenzi and V. Lombardo (eds.), Cross· linguistic Perspectives on Language ProceSSing, 119-148.
© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
120 FRENCK-MESTRE AND PYNTE

structural principles are assumed to be operant in all languages,

with only the "vocabulary", i.e. the lexical items and specific
grammar, differing across languages. In this model, structures
are preferred or disfavored based on their relative syntactic
simplicity alone. A quite different proposal has been put forward
by advocates of a frequency-based parser, where particular
analyses would be adopted by the adult reader due to his/her
prior exposure to a given language and its idiosyncrasies. Two
distinct frequency models have been proposed. The one is
corpus-based, taking into account the number of occurrences of
particular syntactic structures in written corpuses and proposing
an immediate effect of this factor on parsing (Brysbaert &
Mitchell, 1996; Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988; Mitchell, 1994). The
other focuses on lexical statistics, under the assumption that
syntactic and lexical ambiguity are tightly linked (MacDonald et
aI., 1994). As stated by MacDonald et aI. (1994, p. 682) "To the
extent that information required by the syntactic component is
stored with individual lexical items, it will be difficult to find a
boundary between the two systems." These frequency-based
approaches resemble the structural approach in that they assume
a common underlying mechanism across languages. However,
this assumption is based on statistical properties of the language
rather than on syntactic complexity, and these statistics--
concerning the frequency of structures and/or of lexical
properties--are by definition variable across languages (and
within a language if one heeds individual differences or
maturational changes). The strength of the frequency-based
account lies indeed in its ability to accommodate cross-language
differences, even for structures which are identical across very
similar languages.
The corpus-based, or "linguistic tuning" hypothesis has been
disdained by some on the grounds that it does not specify how
frequency counts should be tallied on the one hand, and that it