Abstract: In Chinese language, there are some phrases, which are orderly composed of one verb (VP), one noun (N1), one auxiliary, and another noun (N2). They are temporarily ambiguous between modifier-noun construction (MNC) and narrative-object structure (NOS). Some of them are balanced between MNC and NOS (named Balanced Phrases). The others bias towards either MNC (named MNC-biased Phrases) or NOS (named NOS-biased Phrases). Both balanced and NOS-biased phrases were used to investigate the mechanisms underlying the effect of referential discourse context on the parsing of these ambiguous phrases. Twenty undergraduate students participated in Experiment 1, they were asked to read short passages word-by-word as quickly as possible, without sacrificing their comprehension of each passage. Another sixteen undergraduate students participated in Experiment 2, where their eye movements were recorded when they read the same passages. It was found that the referential discourse context, in both experiments, had its influenced on the parsing of the ambiguous phrases even at the very beginning of these phrases. These results indicate that the specific mechanism that drives the contextual influence may not be attributable solely to referential presuppositions. In other words, informational or conceptual expectations can be, at least partly, responsible for the referential contextual effects observed. In addition, very early influence of discourse context was found in Experiment 2, which was not predicted by garden-path models that suppose initial parsing decision is context-independent.

Key words: syntactic ambiguity resolution, parsing, discourse context, conceptual expectations, Chinese