PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The parallelism effect in human parsing is a phenomenon in which the second constituent of a coordinate structure is processed faster when it parallels the first constituent in comparison with when it does not parallel the first constituent. The main aim of this paper is to investigate whether the parallelism effect, which was first discovered in ambiguous coordinate structures, also occurs in non-coordinate constructions, and in structurally unambiguous sentences. The motivation for investigating these two issues was to determine the extent of, and the mechanisms underlying parallelism effects, with the goal of informing the development of a computational model. Two eye-tracking studies of German showed that parallelism effects are obtained in unambiguous sentences, and strongly suggest that the effect is restricted to coordinate structures. Additionally, the parallelism effect is shown to be sensitive to the fine-grained parts-of-speech of the parallel constituents. Based on these findings, we present a computational system that is able to model our effects, and is consistent with other prevailing results.