Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A major goal of psycholinguistics is to determine what sources of information are used immediately in language comprehension, and what sources come into play at later stages. Prepositional phrase attach-ment ambiguities were used in a self-paced reading task to compare contexts that contained one or two possible referents for the verb phrase (VP) in the target sentence. With one set of sentences, a VP-attachment preference was observed in the 2-VP-referent context, but not in the 1-VP-referent context. With another set of sentences, no effect of context was observed. This result falls outside of the scope of the principle of referential support (Altmann & Steedman, 1988) as currently formulated. It suggests that a similar but more broadly-based theory is required.