Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Much of the controversy surrounding the autonomy of syntax issue has focused on whether prepositional phrase (PP) attachments can be influenced by prira- discourse context. W e briefly review four studies that have produced results supporting either the autonomy view or the interactive view, and then describe the results of a recent series of experiments that identify the conditions under which a read^ will be garden pathed when encountering a structurally ambiguous PP. The results of these experiments suggest that a reader can avoid being led down the garden path by a discourse that successfully creates referential ambiguity, but only in sentences where the verb does not require the P P in order to be grammatical. W e also describe a restricted interactive parser that can account for these empirical results. The parser divides its task between two processors that use limited forms of semantic and discourse information when making attachments.