Context effects on frame probability independent of verb sense ambiguity
Frank Keller, Christoph Scheepers · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2006
Verb frame probability has received wide attention in the parsing literature and in psycholinguistic research.Although frame probabilities obtained from corpora have been shown to correlate with experimental data, the correlation is less than perfect and varies across corpora.We argue that this variability can be explained in terms of discourse context, based on experimental data that show that context has an influence on frame probability for the NP/VP ambiguity in German.This effect is observed for both semantically ambiguous and unambiguous verbs, and hence cannot be explained solely in terms of verb sense ambiguity.