Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Contextual and pragmatic knowledge facilitates the eventual interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence. However, psycholinguistic studies have not provided a clear answer to when and how this non-syntactic knowledge is used. One explanation for the discrepancy of the results is that the predictions for parsing processes in context carmot be specified unless they are based on a theory of text comprehension. The constructionintegration model of discourse comprehension (Kintsch, 1988) is proposed as an example for such a theory. The model is parallel and weakly interactive, and its psychological validity has been shown in a variety of applications. Three simulations for syntactic ambiguity resolutions are presented. In the first, syntactic constraints are used to account for the correct interpretation of a garden-path sentence, as well as for common misparses. In the second example, pragmatic knowledge is used to disambiguate a prepositional phrase attachment. In the final example, it is shown that the model can also account for effects of discourse context in the resolution of prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities.