The Relationship between Syntactic and Semantic Processes in Sentence Comprehension

Abstract

Four experiments investigated the relationship between syntactic and semantic processing. The first two experiments, which used a word-by-word reading paradigm with a makes-sense judgem ent, demonstrated that verb argument structure is used to construct provisional interpretations at points in a sentence where the syntactic structure is ambiguous, and that resolution of syntactic ambiguity occurs even when it is not necessary for interpretation of the input. The last two experiments used a cross-modal integration paradigm and found evidence that multiple syntactic representations are accessed or constructed at points of syntactic ambiguity just as multiple meanings are accessed at points of lexical ambiguity. The experim ental results are evaluated with regard to serial autonomous models, strongly and weakly interactive models, and a hybrid model proposed here.