Abstract
This article presents two self-paced reading experiments which investigate the
role of storage costs associated with maintaining incomplete syntactic
dependencies in structural ambiguity resolution. We argue that previous work has
been equivocal regarding syntactic influences because it has examined
ambiguities where there is little or no resource differential between competing
alternatives. The candidate structures of the ambiguities explored here incur
substantially different storage costs. The results indicate that storage-based
biases can be sufficiently powerful to create difficulty for a structural
alternative even when it is promoted by nonsyntactic factors. These findings are
incorporated into a model of ambiguity resolution in which structural biases
operate as independent graded constraints in selecting between structural
alternatives.
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