Recent work in sentence processing has highlighted the distinction between serial and parallel application of linguistic constraints in real time. In looking at context effects in syntactic ambiguity resolution, some studies have reported an immediate influence of semantic and discourse information on syntactic parsing (e.g., McRae, Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998;. However, in looking at the effects of various constraints on grammaticality judgments, some studies have reported a temporal precedence of structural information over semantic information (e.g., McElree & Griffith, 1995. This chapter points to some computational demonstrations of how an apparent temporal dissociation between structural and non-structural information can in fact arise from the dynamics of the processing system, rather than from its architecture, coupled with the specific parameters of the individual stimuli. A prediction of parallel competitive processing systems is then empirically tested with a new methodology: speeded sentence completions. Results are consistent with a parallel account of the application of linguistic constraints and a competitive account of ambiguity resolution.
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