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The relationship between the frequency and the processing complexity of linguistic structure
E Gibson1, C T Schütze, A Salomon
1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139, USA.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|January 1, 1996
Abstract:
In this paper the relative frequencies of the possible resolutions of ambiguities involving noun phrase attachment sites are compared to the results of off-line psycholinguistic measurements of syntactic complexity. A lack of correlation between the two is observed. It is therefore argued that the comprehension system is distinct from what is driving the frequencies in the corpora. A production heuristic separate from the comprehension system is proposed to account for the observed frequencies.