Modeling the noun phrase versus sentence coordination ambiguity in Dutch: Evidence from Surprisal Theory
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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