Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Subjects were presented with strongly past-participle biased sentences such as, Tlie portrait sketched by the tree was very beautiful, in a self-paced reading time task. Sentences were displayed two words at a lime, (e.g.. The portrait /sketched by ...) so that the verb and the disambiguating preposition were read together. In Experiment 1, a set of materials constructed to minimize the past-tense bias with an inanimate N P was compared with a less constraining set of sentences. The syntactic gardenpalh usually associated with the reducedrelative construction was not present with the more constraining materials, but was with the less constraining N P sentences. In Experiment 2. using only the more constraining materials, preposition lengdi was manipulated so that subjects read sentences with both short (i.e., by) and long (i.e., underneath) prepositions. No syntactic gardenpaths occurred with sentences with the past-participle bias and short prepositions; however, when the same sentences were read with the long prepositions, the syntactic gardenpath was present This result is inconsistent with a deterministic parser. W e expand on our previous proposals that the parser must be able to take into account both semantic and verb-form information, as well as, the amount of disambiguating information (in the form of a preposition) that can be integrated with the ambiguous verb.