Modeling the Noun Phrase versus Sentence Coordination Ambiguity in Dutch: Evidence from Surprisal Theory

Abstract

This paper investigates whether surprisal theory can account for differential processing difficulty in the NP-/S-coordination ambiguity in Dutch.Surprisal is estimated using a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG), which is induced from an automatically annotated corpus.We find that our lexicalized surprisal model can account for the reading time data from a classic experiment on this ambiguity by Frazier (1987).We argue that syntactic and lexical probabilities, as specified in a PCFG, are sufficient to account for what is commonly referred to as an NP-coordination preference.

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