Probabilistic assignments of sentence relations on the basis of differentially weighted interpretive cues

Recent treatments of comprehension have emphasized the role of surface structure characteristics. In many circumstances, meanings that are inferred on the basis of such cues will not be deterministic. This study investigated a probabilistic system of sentence comprehension. Hebrew-speaking university students interpreted utterances that varied and balanced the contradictory and complementary effects of three interpretive cues. Sentence interpretations were systematically affected by the relative weights of cues that supported and opposed different interpretations. Adults therefore seemed to deploy a probabilistic strategy of assigning internal relations to a preferred alternative, a greatest composite of component likelihoods. While the present treatment emphasized a syntactic level of processing, it was suggested that the probabilistic strategy could easily accommodate pragmatic and semantic effects as well. The probabilistic strategy implies that given a conflict between interpretive cues, a decision needs to be made between alternative assignments of internal relations. It was therefore suggested that ambiguous and unambiguous utterances typically may be processed in a similar fashion; for both, more than one meaning may be processed at least in part before a single probabilistic interpretation is finally assigned to the utterance.