Conference presentation: Noun ambiguity resolution in Mandarin Chinese
Hsieh, Yufen. & Boland, J. E. (2007). Narrative-object/modifieir noun ambiguity resolution in Mandarin Chinese. International Conference on Processing Head-final Structures. Rochester, NY, September.
Abstract:
Using the self-paced stop-making-sense paradigm (Boland et al., 1995), we examined the processing of the Chinese ‘Verb NP1 de NP2’ construction, which is temporarily ambiguous between a narrative-object structure (NOS) and a modifier-noun structure (MNS). Two experiments showed that resolving the ambiguity as the more complex, less preferred NOS was cost-free. We took this as evidence for a limited parallel processor that maintains multiple syntactic analyses throughout the ambiguous region of a sentence, when two structures are both supported by the available constraints. In addition, the data patterns replicated an important finding by Zhang et al. (2000), demonstrating that Chinese parsing is multi-constraint based and incremental.