Abstract: In Chinese language, there are three types of phrases, which are composed of one verb, t2o nouns,and one auxiliary, and are temporarily ambiguous between modifier-noun construction (MNC) andnarrative-object structure(NOS). Two of them bias towards either MNC or NOS. The third one isbalanced between MNC and NOS. Directions of being continued, ambiguity, and the types of thesephrases were manipulated to examine the processing of these phrases in sentence reading. With asubject self-paced word-by-word moving window paradigm, significant garden-path effects were foundon the second disambiguating region when ambiguous phrases were continued inappropriately. Mostimportant, subjects resolved the syntactic ambiguity of balanced phrases as modifier-noun structure,which was discussed in terms of sentence parsing principles proposed by garden path models, the resultsof corpus analysis conducted here, and the integrality of verb argument structures.

Key words: parsing, syntactic ambiguity resolution, Chinese, phrases, corpus analysis