Knowing What's Going On. The Influence of Contextual Knowledge on the On-line Resolution of Structural Ambiguity
Ben Sandbank, Niki Vershueren, Jeannette M. Whitmore · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2006
Can world knowledge modulate on-line parsing preferences?This was investigated in two off-line experiments and an online reading study.World knowledge was manipulated through the discourse context.More specifically, it concerned the mental representation that readers build up of the state of affairs described by the text.The results showed that this "contextual knowledge" immediately influenced the initial analysis of the critical sentence.Second, contextual knowledge appeared to overrule not only syntax-based principles, but the influence of topic-structure as well.These results provide evidence for the notion of an interactive parser that deals with different sources of information at the same time.