Garden path sentences• The horse raced past the barn fell.– cf. The horse that was raced past the barn fell. The car driven past the barn crashed.• Minimal Attachment Principle– readers are biased towards syntactically simpler structures• Interfering factors– frequency of lexical co-occurrence– semantic plausibility– verb subcategorization preferences– context: Referential Principle– …The kinder-garden path effectAim: Test the interpretation of sentence in real time by young children (5 year-olds)Method: eye-tracking (instead of reading, as used in adult studies)Experiment(this and many of the following slides adapted from Steven Crain)“Put the frog on the napkin…into the box”two interpretations:Destination of ‘putting’ eventDestination InterpretationModifier of the NP ‘the frog”Modifier Interpretation(“the frog that is on the napkin”)Designig1-referent 2-referentambiguous‘Put the frog on the napkin into the box.’non-ambiguous ‘Put the frog that’s on the napkin into the box.’Ambiguous: The One Frog ConditionboTOrCion the napkin…Put the frog hein…hein…Ambiguous: The One Frog ConditionAiuF CdnDestination of ‘putting’ event (Destination Interpretation)where ?Put the frog on the napkin…Ambiguous: The Two Frog ConditionAiuF CdnDestination of ‘putting’ event (Destination Interpretation)where ?on the napkin…Put the frog hein…hein…?Ambiguous: The Two Frog ConditionAiuF CdnDestination of ‘putting’ event (Destination ...
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