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Underspecification in RC Attachment: Speed-accuracy tradeoff evidence
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Description: A number of studies have found evidence for the so-calledambiguity ad-vantage, i.e., a speed-up in processing ambiguous sentences compared totheir unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regardingthe mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empiricalevidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible with several theo-ries, includingstrategic underspecification(Swets et al., 2008),race models(Van Gompel et al., 2000; Logacev and Vasishth, 2016), and a more recentcoactivation-based account(Dillon et al., 2019). While all three classes oftheories make matching predictions for theaverage timeto complete RCattachment in ambiguous compared to unambiguous sentences, their pre-dictions diverge with regard to theminimum completion times. I used thespeed-accuracy tradeoff procedure to test the predictions of all three classesof theories. According to a hierarchical Bayesian model, the speed-accuracytradeoff functions (SATFs) for different RC attachment conditions (high,low or ambiguous) show an earlier departure from chance performance inthe ambiguous condition than in either of the unambiguous conditions. Theresults further indicate increased asymptotic accuracy but no increase inprocessing rate in the ambiguous condition. Taken together, this pattern ofresults is compatible with the strategic underspecification model, and to alesser degree with coactivation based accounts.
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