rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) (02/05/88)
One classic article on garden-pathing is K.S. Lashley's "The Problem of
Serial Order in Behaviour" (Sol Saporta, ed. _Psycholinguistics:
A Book of Readings_, 1961--originally published in _Cerebral Mechanisms
in Behaviour_1951). When he read the paper to an audience, he
discussed the phrase "rapid writing" at one point. This primed the
audience for a later example in his text:
"Rapid writing with his uninjured hand saved from loss the contents
of the capsized canoe"
Of course, I should have spelled the word as 'righting', but this gives
you the way in which Lashley's audience actually heard the utterance.
Note that this GP sentence can only exist as a spoken, not a written,
sentence.
I think that the spoken/written issue is something of a red herring. It
is true that virtually any GP sentence can be resolved in spoken
English. However, Steedman ("Natural and unnatural language processing"
Jones & Wilks, eds. _Automatic Natural Language Parsing_, 1983) and
others have made the point that the GP effect seldom occurs in natural
language discourse--both spoken and written--because context serves to
resolve it. Not only intonation, but syntactic and pragmatic factors
serve to distract the listener from perceiving the immense amount of
ambiguity that would exist in virtually all sentences if they were
considered in isolation. While intonation can be used to resolve
ambiguity, there is no reason to believe that it always will be used.
So it is quite valid to study the GP phenomena in both spoken and
written contexts.
The controversy in NLP circles revolves around Mitch Marcus' apparent
belief that his parsing methodology chokes on GP sentences in the same
way that humans choke on them. Steedman's point was that humans don't
normally choke on GP sentences because they don't normally perceive them
as such. Lashley's example was so amusing because the discourse context
had to be carefully contrived to produce the effect.
--
Rick Wojcik csnet: rwojcik@boeing.com
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