We investigated contingent frequency effects in syntactic
ambiguity resolution in three self-paced reading
experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the
frequency with which that occurs as a determiner or a
complementizer in different syntactic environments
predicts readers initial parsing preferences. Experiments
2 and 3 demonstrated frequencyand regularity effects for
reading the and that after different types of verbs that
are similar to effects that have been well-documented in
word recognition.
