Summary: JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE 38, 283­312 (1998)
ARTICLE NO. ML972543
Modeling the Influence of Thematic Fit (and Other Constraints)
in On-line Sentence Comprehension
Ken McRae
University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
Michael J. Spivey-Knowlton
Cornell University
and
Michael K. Tanenhaus
University of Rochester
The time-course with which readers use event-specific world knowledge (thematic fit) to
resolve structural ambiguity was explored through experiments and implementation of constraint-
based and two-stage models. In a norming study, subjects completed fragments that ended in the
ambiguous region of a reduced relative clause (The crook arrested/by/the/detective). Completion
proportions up to and including the were influenced by thematic fit. The results were simulated
using a competition model in which independently quantified syntactic and semantic constraints
simultaneously influenced interpretation. Predictions were then generated for a self-paced reading
task using model parameter values established by the off-line simulations. The pattern of reading
times matched the predictions of the constraint-based version of the model but differed substan-

Source: Alishahi, Afra - Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Universität des Saarlandes
Cottrell, Garrison W. - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California at San Diego
DeAngelis, Gregory - Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester

Collections: Biology and Medicine; Computer Technologies and Information Sciences