Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We monitored readers' eye-movements to examine the time-course of discourse and semantic influences in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Our results indicate immediate and simultaneous influences of referential context and local semantic fit in the reading of reduced relative clauses (i.e.. The horse raced past the bam fell.). These results support a model of sentence processing in which alternatives of a syntactic ambiguity are differentially activated by the bottom-up input, and syntactically-relevant contextual constraints simultaneously add activation to their supported alternatives. Competition between comparably active alternatives may then cause slowed reading times in regions of ambiguity.