Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.