Abstract
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-
tially from a one-region delay garden-path version. In addition, a garden-path model with a very
short delay simulated the data better than the one-region delay model, but not as closely as the
constraint-based version. The experiment and modeling illustrate that thematic fit is computed
and used immediately in on-line sentence comprehension. Furthermore, the modeling highlighted
the difficulty of interpreting sentence comprehension experiments without both quantifying the
relevant constraints and implementing the mechanisms involved.
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