Finding identity in the midst of ambiguity: case and number disambiguation in Basque
Data
2020Egilea
Ristic, Bojana
Mancini, Simona
Molinaro, Nicola
Bojana Ristic , Simona Mancini & Nicola Molinaro (2020) Finding identity in the midst of ambiguity: case and number disambiguation in Basque, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 35:10, 1272-1282, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2020.1734639
Laburpena
Restrictive contextual information has been found to bias syntactic disambiguation, when only one
alternative leads to a meaningful interpretation. The current study tests whether disambiguation
can be influenced by nonrestrictive cues – when several alternatives are equally plausible. We
first evaluated if modifier number biased the disambiguation of number- and case-ambiguous
nouns in Basque. In a noun phrase comprehension paradigm, ambiguous noun number
judgments were biased by preceding modifier number. Then, using a preamble completion
paradigm, we examined whether headnoun disambiguation and thus sentence completion was
also biased by modifier number. Our results suggest that nonrestrictive information (singular and
plural number) can affect disambiguation. We also report task differences in the overall
interpretation of ambiguous Basque nouns, as well modifier-induced agreement errors. We
suggest that the parser uses any available context information when there is ambiguity,
including preceding modifier markings.