Frazier L, Pacht J M, Rayner K
Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 01003, USA.
Cognition. 1999 Feb 1;70(1):87-104. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(99)00002-5.
In earlier work, Frazier and Rayner (1990) provided evidence for a processing principle termed the Minimal Semantic Commitment (MSC)hypothesis. In the present study, we used the MSC hypothesis as a starting point in addressing the issue of when to treat mental representations as vague versus determinate and ambiguous. Given ambiguous representations, the MSC hypothesis predicts that the processor will commit to one interpretation (the grammatical ambiguity hypothesis). On the other hand, given a single underspecified representation, the MSC hypothesis predicts that the processor will await disambiguating information before fully committing to an interpretation (the vagueness hypothesis). In an experiment designed to evaluate these hypotheses with respect to the representation of distributivity, participants' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing distributive or collective predicates that were either disambiguated by a preceding adverb or left locally ambiguous by delaying the disambiguating adverb until the end of the predicate. The results suggested that a semantic commitment is made in locally indeterminate cases as evidenced by a significant interaction of ambiguity and distributivity in first pass times, total times, and regressions. If the difficulty of distributives simply reflected the difficulty of postulating a distributive operator when evidence warranting it is encountered, then no interaction would be expected. Hence we argue that the distributive/collective distinction is treated as a matter of ambiguity rather than as one of vagueness. In the absence of evidence for a distributive reading, the processor commits itself to a collective reading sometime during the processing of the predicate (before the disambiguation in our late disambiguation examples). The findings are discussed in relation to recent linguistic work on the representation of distributivity.
在早期的研究中，弗雷泽和雷纳（1990）为一种称为最小语义承诺（MSC）假说的加工原则提供了证据。在本研究中，我们以MSC假说为出发点，来探讨何时将心理表征视为模糊、确定或歧义的问题。对于歧义表征，MSC假说预测加工者会采用一种解释（语法歧义假说）。另一方面，对于单一的未明确说明的表征，MSC假说预测加工者在完全采用一种解释之前会等待消除歧义的信息（模糊性假说）。在一项旨在评估这些关于分配性表征假说的实验中，记录了参与者阅读包含分配性或集合性谓语句子时的眼动情况，这些句子要么由前面的副词消除歧义，要么通过将消除歧义的副词延迟到谓语结束而在局部保持歧义。结果表明，在局部不确定的情况下会做出语义承诺，这在首次阅读时间、总时间和回视次数上歧义性和分配性的显著交互作用中得到了证明。如果分配性的难度仅仅反映了在遇到支持性证据时假设一个分配算子的难度，那么就不会预期有交互作用。因此，我们认为分配性/集合性的区别被视为一个歧义问题，而不是模糊性问题。在没有分配性解读证据的情况下，加工者在谓语加工过程中的某个时候（在我们的延迟消除歧义示例中的消除歧义之前）会采用集合性解读。我们将结合最近关于分配性表征的语言学研究来讨论这些发现。
