La levée des ambiguïtés syntaxiques : apport des recherches interlangues
Saveria Colonna, Joël Pynte · L’Année psychologique · 2002
Summary : Resolution of syntactic ambiguities : Evidence from cross-linguistic studies. Determining how people convert a string of words into a representation of the structure of the sentence is a central problem in sentence processing. Studying how people handle syntactic ambiguities offers much of the information needed to tackle important issues in parsing. The first section of this article presents three types of models as a function of the solutions they propose in case of syntactic ambiguity : 1/ the parser forces the decision (e.g., in favour of the simplest structure) ; 2/ the choice is postponed until more information is available ; 3/ the different structures are processed in parallel, together with other sources of information. The second section shows that these models cannot explain cross-linguistic differences observed in the resolution of syntactically ambiguous sentences. The third section presents a few new models that have been proposed to explain cross-linguistic data. This review shows how cross-linguistic findings raise major difficulties for models that have been presented so far in the literature. Key words : syntactic ambiguity, sentence comprehension, relative clause.