Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We implement a constraint satisfaction connectionist style model that accounts for data from three psycholinguistics experiments investigating the gardenpaih effect with reduced relative constructions. Normative data was collected on the stimuli used in experiments by Burgess and Tanenhaus (1992) and Ferreira and Clifton (1986) and this data served as the input for the simulation. W e have demonstrated with this set of simulations that a plausible theoretical framework for a range of these results is a hierarchical connectionist network which is sensitive to a number of constraints inherent in the input stimuli. The model accounts for the top-down effect of context, the contribution of the bottom-up morphological frequency asymmetry of the verb, and the probabilistic nature of the disambiguating preposition. These effects are sensitive to the timecourse of processing as well. The pattern of results from the psycholinguistic data suggest that syntactic processing is a confluence of multiple constraints that represent both bouomup and top-down influences in processing. These results are incompatible with a deterministic parsing model. The hierarchical connectionist style model presented in this paper is sensitive to the range of constraints discussed above and is offered as a more adaptive theoretical model that can capture the domain of effects found in the literature encompassing local syntactic ambiguity resolution.