Friederici A D, Steinhauer K, Mecklinger A, Meyer M
Max-Planck-Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany.
Biol Psychol. 1998 Mar;47(3):193-221. doi: 10.1016/s0301-0511(97)00033-1.
Parsing strategies in temporarily ambiguous sentences were investigated in readers with different sentence memory capacities using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Readers with a high memory span as well as readers with a low memory span were required to read subject and object relative sentences which were either ambiguous until the last word (late disambiguation) or were disambiguated by case marking either the clause initial pronoun (immediate disambiguation) or the noun phrase following it (early disambiguation). ERPs registered during sentence reading elicited the following effects: In the late disambiguation condition, high span readers, but not low span readers, displayed a more positive going wave at the disambiguating number marked auxiliary for the object relative sentences than for the subject relative sentences. This positivity is taken to reflect processes of revision that become necessary at the disambiguating element if the initial structure considered is a subject relative clause. When case marking was available in the clause initial at the relative pronoun, both high and low span readers showed a positivity at the disambiguating element for the object relative sentences, suggesting the immediate use of case marking information for revision. When case marking was available in the noun phrase following an ambiguous pronoun both groups showed no clear effect of revision at the disambiguating element, but only at the sentence final number marked auxiliary. This non-immediate use of the case marking information seems to be due to an inherent ambiguity in the German case marking system which interacts with the disambiguating element's position in the sentence. The combined data indicate that morphological information can be used immediately by high and low span readers to resolve syntactic ambiguity during sentence processing whenever the information given is clearly unambiguous. In addition they suggest that possible processing differences in ambiguity resolution between high and low span readers may only appear when the ambiguous regions are long.
利用事件相关脑电位（ERP），研究了不同句子记忆能力的读者对临时歧义句的解析策略。要求高记忆广度的读者和低记忆广度的读者阅读主语关系句和宾语关系句，这些句子要么直到最后一个词才消除歧义（晚期消除歧义），要么通过格标记（立即消除歧义）来消除歧义，格标记的对象要么是从句开头的代词，要么是其后的名词短语（早期消除歧义）。句子阅读过程中记录的ERP产生了以下效应：在晚期消除歧义条件下，高记忆广度的读者在宾语关系句的消除歧义数字标记助动词处，比在主语关系句处表现出更正向的波，但低记忆广度的读者没有。这种正向性被认为反映了如果最初考虑的结构是主语关系从句，那么在消除歧义元素处进行修正所必需的过程。当在关系代词处的从句开头有格标记时，高记忆广度和低记忆广度的读者在宾语关系句的消除歧义元素处都表现出正向性，这表明立即使用格标记信息进行修正。当在歧义代词后的名词短语中有格标记时，两组在消除歧义元素处都没有明显的修正效应，而只在句子末尾的数字标记助动词处有。这种对格标记信息的非立即使用似乎是由于德语格标记系统中固有的歧义，它与消除歧义元素在句子中的位置相互作用。综合数据表明，只要给出的信息明确无误，高记忆广度和低记忆广度的读者在句子处理过程中都可以立即使用形态信息来解决句法歧义。此外，它们还表明，高记忆广度和低记忆广度的读者在歧义解决方面可能存在的处理差异，可能只在歧义区域较长时才会出现。
