On-line sentence processing of modified noun-noun compounds
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2017-07-06
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en
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Abstract
In the field of sentence processing studies, the ambiguity that occurs in modified
noun-noun compound phrases, like the porcelain egg container, has been generally ignored. A number of models have been developed that help account for ambiguity in language (Frazier, 1987; Pritchett, 1992; MacDonald et al, 1994; Frazier & Clifton, 1996; Gibson, 1998; Ferreira & Lowder, 2016). However, none of these models seem to have been designed with accounting for [ANN] compound ambiguity in mind. In the present study, differences in processing of disambiguated [ANN] structures were compared by means of self-paced reading task. For the task, sentence-pairs were designed with [A[NN]] structures in one alternative and [[AN]N] in the other, where the semantic properties of the adjective were the disambiguating element. The experiment found no difference between the reading times for the two structures. The present paper further argued that this is evidence in favour of Ferreira and Lowder (2016)’s model, and MacDonald et al. (1994)’s model.
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