Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Perspective from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology and Artificial Intelligence

1922.

Preface

Steven L. Small,     Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester

Garrison W. Cottrell,     Institute for Cognitive Science, University of California at San Diego

Michael K. Tanenhaus,     Department of Psychology, University of Rochester

The goal of this book is to bring together current research from several disciplines on the problem of lexical ambiguity resolution in the processing of natural language. This research spans psychology, computer science and linguistics, providing an interdisciplinary, Cognitive Science perspective. The aim is to provide a sourcebook for cognitive scientists and those interested in lexical ambiguity, whether they be working primarily in artificial intelligence, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, or theoretical linguistics. This volume includes papers that would otherwise require a search through the journals and conference proceedings of many disciplines to find. Furthermore, the authors have described their research goals and results in such a way that cognitive scientists of different fields can comprehend their general import. Along the way, perhaps some consensus on the important problems may emerge. This book is at least the starting point for such a consensus.

Some readers may feel that lexical ambiguity resolution is too narrow a topic for a book. Hence a look at the scope of this problem from the point of view of a discipline (Artificial Intelligence) that is trying to resolve it is in order. Lexical ambiguity was rarely attacked directly in early work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in Artificial Intelligence. However, it is perhaps the most important problem facing an NLU system. Given that the goal of NLU is understanding, correctly determining the meanings of the words used is fundamental. This is not an issue limited to strange sentences devised by linguists. In an informal study, Gentner [1982] found that the 20 most frequent nouns have an average of 7.3 word senses each; the 20 most frequent verbs have an average of 12.4 senses each. Small [1978] lists 57 senses for the word take. Not to be outdone, Hirst [1984] reports that go has 63 meanings listed in the Merriam Webster Pocket Dictionary. It is remarkable that people rarely notice this degree of ambiguity in their most frequently used words. An important premise underlying the work in this book is that it is important to understand how people resolve the ambiguity problem, since whatever their approach, it appears to work rather well.

A Taxonomy of Lexical Ambiguity

Lexical ambiguity is of two types, syntactic and semantic. Syntactic lexical ambiguity simply refers to ambiguity of category, e.g., noun vs. verb. For example, fish can be either the act performed by an angler or the target of his activity. This is to be distinguished from structural ambiguity, which refers to sentences which have more than one phrase structure tree assignable to them. Winograd’s famous example is Put the block in the box on the table, which can be assigned two structures depending on whether in the box modifies block or not. In general, we will not address problems of structural ambiguity in this book.

Semantic lexical ambiguity is of two types. Polysemy refers to words whose several meanings are related. For example, the two uses of fell in Chile’s democracy fell to CIA backed generals and John fell and hurt himself are similar in meaning, but not literally the same. Polysemy, as pointed out by Hirst [1984], often blends into metaphor. Homonymy refers to words whose various definitions are unrelated, as in the two uses of ball in They danced till dawn at the ball versus This dog can be entertained all day with a ball.

Semantic and syntactic ambiguity are orthogonal, since a single word can have related meanings in different categories (as in can of fruit vs. to can fruit), or unrelated meanings in different categories (as in I saw the carpenter’s saw), or both (I saw the carpenter sawing with the rusty saw).

In order to resolve ambiguity, an NLU system (human or otherwise) has to take into account many sources of knowledge. For example, categorial ambiguity can often be resolved on syntactic considerations alone, as in I can do it, where the only possible syntactic class of can is auxiliary. Some sentences are globally ambiguous in this respect, e.g., in His will be done, the category of will is either auxiliary or noun, depending on who is speaking and where, i.e., a minister in church, or a mechanic in a garage. This also illustrates how categorial and structural ambiguity can interact.

People appear to use semantic sources of information for categorial disambiguation as well, although this sometimes leads them astray, as in The old man the boats (the old people operate the boats). Although there is a syntactic frequency argument as well, one explanation for the garden path nature of this sentence is that the semantic representation of old man overrides the proper syntactic interpretation. The fact that such semantic garden path sentences exist is some evidence that the semantic representation of a word can influence decisions concerning its syntactic representation.

Semantic ambiguities often require global context for their resolution as well. For example, She looked at her pupils could mean either her eyes or her students, depending on the situation. However, often all that is required is local context, specifically, the context provided by the rest of the sentence. For example, in Bob threw the fight, whether threw refers to propelling something or intentionally losing something is determined by the presence of fight.

Now we can see that lexical ambiguity is a difficult problem. Not only are there several kinds of lexical ambiguity,¹ but they can interact in complex ways, both with each other and with other types of knowledge. Consideration of these problems leads us willy-nilly into the mysteries of understanding language. The fundamental mystery is why understanding seems so simple for humans. The puzzle for cognitive scientists is to try and unravel the means by which this trick is accomplished. Two major approaches are represented in this book. The first might be termed top-down—try to build a language understanding device in order to discover the functions necessary, and to determine how they should interact. The other is bottom-up—examine the phenomena in the laboratory and try to induce the nature of the processes being used. In the next section we briefly summarize the goals of each paper.

A Tour of the Book

The papers collected here represent most of the current approaches to the study of lexical ambiguity resolution in many disciplines. The articles from artificial intelligence (AI) provide computational data regarding the nature of the knowledge and processes found to be necessary to perform lexical disambiguation computationally. This research describes certain formally defined mechanisms (i.e., algorithms) that can account for this computation. Some of these articles suggest how well such algorithms correspond in their functional characteristics to the available data on human processing. Computer programs provide valuable specificity in modeling the processes, yet the assumptions they make in formulating this specification are often incorrect as models of human processing. In contrast, psychological models of ambiguity resolution have generally been somewhat vague in their processing and representational assumptions. However, using a variety of newly developed Chronometric techniques, psychologists have been able to provide preliminary answers to some of the important questions about how human language users process lexical ambiguity. In particular, a detailed picture is emerging of the time course of meaning access and ambiguity resolution. The psycholinguistic papers in this volume sample the spectrum of current experimental work on lexical ambiguity resolution, including pioneering neurolinguistic studies.

Although the experimental results demonstrate that multiple levels of processing appear to be involved in lexical ambiguity resolution, the interactions among these levels and the time course of knowledge application within and between levels is not well understood. Just as experimental studies of ambiguity resolution can guide and constrain computational theories, the computational literature may provide ideas that will shape the next generation of experimental studies.

AI Models

Many approaches to various parts of the ambiguity problem are represented by these works. In an interesting extension to Word Expert Parsing, Adriaens and Small consider not only lexical ambiguity but other lexical effects in parsing, most notably, long distance dependencies. Milne gives a clear account of how many form class ambiguities may be accounted for by top down expectations in a Marcus-style deterministic parser. This is an important first cut in the search for the meaning of a word. Picking up where Milne leaves off, Hirst assumes that the category of the word has already been selected, and tries to determine the proper meaning of a word. As in the Word Expert Parser, each word has a process associated with it (called a Polaroid Word) that interacts with the processes for other words and a knowledge base. Unlike WEP, it uses a uniform set of rules for each form class and uses marker passing through a frame system to select the proper frame for disambiguation purposes. Frame selection is a hard problem for frame-based systems, often solved by using a lexically based approach. Lytinen points out problems with this approach in the case of polysemous words, and gives an alternative algorithm for frame selection via a process of concept refinement in a hierarchical frame system. Parisi and Castelfranchi identify various decision points from a processing point of view in their lexically based parsing system. They display several procedures for resolving the ambiguities presented depending on the type of choice point.

Many researchers have said that there is a scale of lexical ambiguity from words with unrelated meanings to words with related meanings to metaphorical usage. This view is complicated by other types of usage, such as metonymy, a figure of language in which a part stands for the whole (e.g., nice set of wheels). Fass demonstrates a new algorithm for matching semantic structures occurring in is a sentences that recognizes instances of metonymy and metaphor in the service of building an appropriate semantic representation.

Turning to systems that attempt to mimic human mechanisms, Cottrell describes a simple connectionist model for the access of word meanings that aims to account for some of the psychological data on that process. Kawamoto’s model goes further describing how such knowledge can be learned in a connectionist framework. Finally, Gigley’s system hypothesizes processing deficits that may account for aphasic performance in processing sentences.

Empirical Studies

Experimental studies of lexical ambiguity resolution have primarily been concerned with tracing the time course of lexical access and ambiguity resolution. Lexical access is the process of accessing all of the information about a word, usually from visual or auditory input. Three questions have been of primary interest: (1) Does lexical access make available one or more than one meaning of an ambiguous word? (2) Does prior context constrain lexical access such that only the contextually biased sense is initially accessed? (3) Does the relative frequency (dominance) of the different senses affect access, and interact with the effects of biasing sentential context? In the late 1970s and early 1980s a number of studies used cross-modal priming paradigms in which experimental subjects listened to a sentence and made a rapid response to a visually presented target word displayed at some point during the sentence. Facilitation in responding to a target word that is related to a particular sense of an ambiguous word provides evidence for that sense having been active at the time that target was presented. For example, facilitation to the target word MONEY following the ambiguous word BANK indicates the financial institution sense of BANK was active. The consensus that emerged from these studies was that all common meanings of an ambiguous word are accessed regardless of contextual bias, with contextually inappropriate senses becoming rapidly unavailable.

The papers in this volume add considerable detail to this story and in some cases argue that it is fundamentally incorrect. Simpson and Burgess provide a general introduction to experimental studies of lexical ambiguity, and to their role in addressing fundamental issues of word recognition and its development. They also present some recent experiments demonstrating that word senses are accessed in the order of their relative frequencies. Prather and Swinney offer a spirited defense of the hypothesis that the early stages of lexical processes operate as an autonomous processing module. They also discuss backward priming, the priming of a word by a following target word and its implications for the cross-modal ambiguity literature. Backward priming is the focus of the paper by Tanenhaus, Burgess, and Seidenberg. They present experiments that challenge a recent paper by Glucksberg, Rho, and Kreuz which concluded that only contextually biased senses of ambiguous words are accessed when backward priming is eliminated by the use of special targets. Tabossi discusses some recent experiments demonstrating that contexts emphasizing salient features of the dominant sense of an ambiguous word result in only the biased sense being activated. These experiments offer the strongest challenge to modularity hypotheses, and emphasize the importance of focusing on the properties of different types of biasing contexts. Gentner and France use the clever device of varying the semantic plausibility of sentences, setting up a competition between nouns and verbs for domination of the resulting sentential meaning. The relative strength of nouns and verbs are assessed in a paraphrase task, and the results used to infer the properties of the system.

Holbrook, Eiselt, Granger, and Matthei address the neglected problem of how readers retrieve the correct sense of an ambiguous word when the context biases the sense that eventually turns out to be incorrect. For example, He made the medical students examine the tiny cell so that they would be aware of the consequences of malpractice. They argue that only the contextually biased sense is active, whereas other senses are conditionally retained. Burgess and Simpson address the same issue from a different perspective. They present an experiment that suggests that multiple senses for ambiguous words are retained longer in the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere, and they conjecture that the right hemisphere may play a fundamental role both in recovery from initial misassignment, and more broadly, in the interpretation of non-literal meaning.

Progress in understanding ambiguity resolution and other rapid unconscious processes in language understanding depends crucially on methodologies that can track the time course of comprehension processes. In pioneering work, Van Petten and Kutas use event-related potentials produced by brain waves to track ambiguity resolution. They argue that their results challenge the conclusions drawn from other experimental techniques. In particular, they suggest that the pattern of EEG activity supports a backward priming explanation for multiple access. Although the interpretation of these results is likely to be controversial, this experiment represents an important extension of an exciting methodology.

Most of the experimental work represented here is concerned with the core meaning of nouns having unrelated senses. The important issue of polysemy is confronted by Brugman and Lakoff in a case study of the word over. They show that there are many regularities to be discovered in the relationships between the meanings of polysemous words, relationships which could be exploited by a natural language understanding system. Similar analyses of other polysemous words are likely to uncover systematic patterns in the way core meanings are extended.

Conclusion

We believe that progress in understanding natural language must depend on integrating ideas drawn from artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and the neurosciences. Lexical ambiguity has served as something of a case study in cognitive science, an area in which researchers from different disciplines have already significantly benefited from each others’ work. As. the articles in this volume clearly illustrate, there is room for more interaction. If it helps to encourage further interdisciplinary work, this book will have served its purpose.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank, first of all, the contributors to this volume for their patience during the seemingly endless process of completing this book and for their time in cross-reviewing each other’s work. Additional reviewers included Yves Chauvin, David Corina, Mark Fanty, Susan Garnsey, Cathy Harris, Kerry Kilborn, Michael Mozer, and Jay Weber, who took valuable time away from their own research to help us.

This book would not have been possible without the administrative acuity of Peggy Meeker who managed the paperwork through the first half of the publishing process. Thanks for moral and other support go to Jerry Feldman, George Miller, and Yorick Wilks, who each in his own way lent encouragement to this project. The beauty of the final product is the result of the tenacity of our excellent production manager, Jennifer Ballentine.

Steven L. Small, Gary Cottrell and Michael Tanenhaus

May 1988

¹We have not even covered all of the types. For the most part, we ignore in this book the problem of referential ambiguity, that is, the problem of determining which conceptual entity a word (especially pronouns) refers to.

PART I

COMPUTER MODELS

Chapter 1

Word Expert Parsing Revisited in a Cognitive Science Perspective

Geert Adriaens,     Siemens AI Research, Leuven, Belgium

Steven L Small¹,     Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester

Publisher Summary

This chapter discusses word expert parsing from the perspective of cognitive science. It additionally describes the general principles, representations and implementation of a computational model of natural language understanding—the Word Expert Parser—that attaches great importance to lexical ambiguity resolution. The chapter also discusses its flaws and merits as a model to understand human language. The greatest flaws are: (1) the absence of an implemented large-scale semantic network, (2) the absence of important psychological concept of spreading activation within that kind of network, (3)the impreciseness of the relationship between the time course of its operations, and (4) impreciseness of human language processing along with absence of true parallelism. The model has a number of merits as well: (1) its stress on the lexicon fits in with the general lexicalist approach in linguistics, (2) implements interactive view of language processing, (3) it works in accordance with a number of important results in psycho- and neurolinguistics, and (4) it yields interesting predictions about normal and aphasic behavior. These features make the model a valuable computational tool for cognitive science research in human natural language understanding.

1 Introduction

The Word Expert Parser (WEP) [Small, 1980] was an early AI model of natural language understanding to make a serious attempt at handling multiple senses of the words in its vocabulary.² WEP was a semantic parsing program in which lexical ambiguity resolution was considered the essence of language understanding. This view led to a radical departure from other parsing models, and a system architecture based upon disambiguation mechanisms, which will be discussed in the next section of this chapter. Besides being a working AI program, WEP also claimed to be a model of the process of language comprehension in the human being. Although at the time little was done to confront these claims with results of linguistic, psychological, and neurological research, the growing importance of cognitive science has inspired such a confrontation. The third (and main) section of this chapter directly addresses this issue; we shall put WEP in a broader cognitive science perspective, discussing its flaws and merits through a confrontation with linguistics and psycholinguistics (for a confrontation with neurolinguistic research, see [Adriaens, 1986b]). The final section briefly discusses some issues for future research.

2 Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

2.1 General Principles

When we look at the words of a natural language (by skimming through a dictionary, or by introspection), we find that they are objects with a very rich and highly idiosyncratic content. Some help tie other words together (e.g., a, the, in), while others display a great number of different meanings (e.g., deep, throw, pit), from among which the human being is capable of picking the contextually appropriate one during comprehension.

A large number of existing parsing systems ignore this richness of individual words and the entirety of the sense selection problem. They advocate instead an approach that captures generalities about language in syntactic and/or semantic rules, treating the words as tokens that simply participate in comprehension by virtue of their inclusion in these rules (see [Rieger and Small, 1981]).

The apparent incompatibility of the sense selection problem and the rule-based approaches led to a radically different model organization. Instead of having a number of components (e.g., morphological, syntactic, semantic), consisting of static rule structures spanning sentence constituents or complete sentences, with some central interpreter taking care of the application of these rules to the input, the words themselves are considered as active agents, or word experts. They trigger processes that idiosyncratically control the whole parsing process. This process involves continuous interaction of a word with a number of knowledge sources in memory: the words in its immediate context, the concepts processed so far or expected locally, knowledge of the overall process state, knowledge of the discourse, and real-world knowledge. These knowledge sources are not invoked uniformly by a general interpreter, but are accessible at all times by the word expert processes throughout the overall process of sense discrimination. They help the experts to eventually agree on a context-specific semantic interpretation of a fragment of text. This overall parsing process makes crucial use of word-based expectations guiding the word experts in their sense discrimination.

In summary, word expert parsing is seen as a data-driven (word-by-word), expectation-based, highly interactive process coordinated by the individual words that are viewed as active knowledge sources (word experts). We will now take a closer look at matters of representation and implementation that turn these principles into a working program.

2.2 Representation

Informally, word experts can be viewed as sense discrimination networks consisting of nodes of context-probing questions and arcs corresponding to the range of possible answers. Each of the leaves of the network represents a specific contextual meaning of the word in question reached after network traversal during sentence processing. Figure 1.1 shows such an informal network for the highly ambiguous word deep. The left half of the net represents its adjectival usages ((1) through (4)), the right half its nominal ones ((5) through (7)). Meaning (1) would be arrived at in a context like The deep philosopher likes Levinas, (2) in a context like He throws the ring into the deep pit; meaning (5) would be chosen in the context The giant squid still lives in the deep, etc. for the other usages.

Figure 1.1 A sense discrimination network

These nets form the basis for the design and development of word experts, but have to be translated into a formal declarative representation used procedurally by the WEP process. Such a representation is a graph composed of designated subgraphs without cycles. Each subgraph (an entry point) consists of question nodes that probe the multiple knowledge sources mentioned above and action nodes that build and refine concepts, keep track of their lexical sequences, etc. These questions and actions constitute the formal representation language for word experts. We will not give a full description of the syntax and semantics of the word expert representation language here, but briefly mention the most important questions and actions that deal specifically with sense discrimination (excluding bookkeeping actions that keep track of lexical sequences, and internal expert control actions). The actions that deal with expert interaction are discussed in Section 2.3, the subsection about implementation. The Appendix contains an example word expert (the expert for deep that implements part of the network of Figure 1.1). A full description can be found in [Small, 1980], and partial descriptions in [Small and Rieger, 1982], [Small and Lucas, 1983], and [Adriaens, 1986b]. Figure 1.2 shows the questions and actions performing sense discrimination within the word experts.³

Figure 1.2 Sense discrimination questions and actions

The actions build concept structures as a side effect of the course of the overall parsing process. In WEP, these structures have received much less attention than the processing issues (how to control the expert interactions). Hence, not much will be said about them here. Nouns build entity concepts, that are refined by their modifiers; verbs assign roles to the entities, deciding on the contextually appropriate caseframe (the ROLEC action and its counterpart ASPECTC—see also Section 3.4). The result is a kind of dependency structure linking together all the concepts built up during the process.

The questions deserve a little more attention, since they direct the sense disambiguation process. An example of the SIGNAL question can be found in the word expert for deep in the Appendix. In order to find out at what point it enters the process, deep probes its incoming signal (if it is entity-construction, deep simply participates in the current lexical sequence and goes on to its subprocess at entry 1. If not, it first opens a sequence). The BINDC question is probably the most important probing question since the process of disambiguation depends fundamentally on interactions between word experts and memory mechanisms. An expert can probe the active memory containing the concepts processed so far, it can look at the concepts expected by other experts, it can probe elements of the discourse (e.g., what is in focus?), and it can appeal to real-world knowledge. The VIEW question completes the memory interactions: it reflects the relative ability of memory to view one memory object as another, i.e., it tries to determine the conceptual closeness (proximity) of two memory objects.

The understanding of My friends throw a get-together depends on the ability of memory (probed by throw in this sentence) to view a get-together as most closely related to a party. Thus, the throw expert asking the VIEW question (can the concept fulfilling the object role in my frame best be viewed as a physical object, a person, a contest, etc., or a party?) can continue its sense refinement accordingly. Finally, the LITERAL and IDIOM questions look for particular lexical elements. The throw expert, for instance, looks at the word to its right (with the LITERAL question) and takes appropriate actions if it happens to be one of the possible particles it can take (away, up, in, or out). Supposing it was in, and a concept was processed after throw in, throw probes the lexical sequence of this concept (with the IDIOM question) to see if it is e.g., the towel, which leads to a concept refinement give up.

Since this completes our overview of the sense discrimination part of the WEP representation language, a word is in order about the implementation of all the memory mechanisms discussed. The answers to the real-world, discourse and view probes are currently provided by interaction with the WEP user. This is mainly a matter of clean design: the inter-expert interactions have been the focus of attention. Access mechanisms to the knowledge sources in memory are provided, but we have chosen to assume the existence of a fully developed central semantic network scheme (along the lines of Fahlman [1979]), which we shall eventually integrate with the language system.

2.3 Implementation

So far we have discussed the general principles behind WEP, and the representation issues following from those principles. In this last subsection we will discuss the overall system implementation. How is it that the experts can communicate with each other throughout the disambiguation process to finally agree on the meaning of a fragment of text?

The decentralized representation of parsing knowledge in word experts leads to an overall model organization which supports exchange of information and distributed decision-making (i.e., agreement on overall meaning). Every word expert is implemented as a LISP coroutine. A coroutine is a process that runs for a while (in our case: coordinating the entire parsing process when it does), suspends itself when it needs a piece of information (letting another coroutine take over control), runs again when this information arrives, etc. until it stops executing. Thus, the lexical interaction among the expert coroutines consists first of providing information, and second, waiting for needed information.

Figure 1.3 contains the WEP actions that are used by individual word experts to perform these tasks. This set of actions was called the Lexical Interaction Language by Small [1980].

Figure 1.3 Lexical Interaction language

Providing information happens through the WEP actions REPORT and SIGNAL, making a concept or signal available for use by other experts respectively. Awaiting and receiving information requires a more complicated protocol, involving suspension of execution while waiting for a piece of information from another expert and resumption of execution when that information becomes available. This basic aspect of distributed control is taken care of by restart daemons, data structures created automatically by the WEP action AWAIT which specifies the nature of the awaited information (a SIGNAL, CONCEPT or specific WORD) and the point at which to continue execution upon arrival of the awaited data.

It should be noted that execution of the AWAIT action does not necessarily imply complete suspension of a word expert, since the different entry points of an expert are designed to be executed in parallel. One part of the process may temporarily be suspended, but other parts can go on, even initiating other restart daemons in turn (several outstanding AWAITs are possible). Yet, an expert cannot wait forever for some piece of information as there is no certainty about arrival. Therefore, each restart daemon is accompanied by a timeout daemon which specifies how long the expert is willing to wait for the information it desires⁴ and the point at which to continue processing if the restart daemon times out (see [Small, 1981] for a full discussion of timeouts). An interesting aspect of this intricate machinery is that WEP does not contain some finite fixed length buffer to represent working memory, but models memory limitation with processes that have a strictly limited life span.

Figure 1.4 illustrates by way of a cartoon the overall WEP control flow resulting from the coroutine environment. This flow of control can be viewed as the movement of a window across the input stream. Inside the window, control passes from word expert to word expert and back again. Reading new words and the termination of old experts causes the overall processing window to move ahead, expanding its right side and contracting its left side. Eventually, the window includes the last word of the input text, and the process terminates.

Figure 1.4 Word expert parser control flow

Note that attempts to create a fully distributed implementation of the word expert parser, with parallel execution of entry points in word experts, have not been successful. Some of the reasons for this are discussed in [Small et al., 1982], [Cottrell and Small, 1983] and in another context by [Fahlman, 1982]. This has led to the (massively parallel) connectionist approach to parsing (see [Cottrell and Small, 1983], [Cottrell, 1985], and chapters in this volume by Gigley, Cottrell, and Kawamoto). However, this failure has not resulted in the complete abandonment of WEP but rather in the relaxation of its claims as a fully distributed system. In the sections to come we will see that the system has a number of interesting aspects that motivate continued research. Moreover, an attempt is being made to redefine WEP in such a rigid way that implementation in a parallel version of PROLOG should become possible.

3 Word Expert Parsing and Psycholinguistics

3.1 Introduction

In the last several years, interest in the lexicon and its organization has grown substantially. At the same time the study of processes has become a fundamental element unifying the field: computational processes in AI, cognitive processes in psychology, neural processes in the neurosciences (see [Arbib et al., 1982] or [Winograd, 1983]). Since WEP integrates both lexicon and process into one model, it may be considered a cognitive science approach from an AI perspective. Thus, it is interesting to look at the model from the perspective of some of the other disciplines, which we do in this section.

Since much recent psychological research deals with the way or ways access and further processing of the mental lexicon are done during sentence comprehension, we will now confront the findings of this research with the WEP model. First, WEP will be situated within general models of sentence processing. Next, we will go into specific research topics.

3.2 General Models

Currently, there seem to be two kinds of global psycholinguistic models of language processing. One kind is the autonomous component model [Forster, 1979], both for spoken and written language), the other is the interactive model [Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1980] for spoken language, [Just and Carpenter, 1980] for written language).

In Forster’s model the language processor consists of a linear chain of three separate and autonomous processing systems: a lexical processor locating the input elements in the lexicon, a syntactic processor assigning syntactic structures to the input and a semantic processor (called message processor) building conceptual structures. (Note the correspondence between levels of processing and levels of linguistic description.) Thus, the input enters the lexical processor, whose output enters the syntactic processor, whose output in turn enters the message processor; no other communication among the processors is allowed. All three processors have access to a language-oriented data storage, the lexicon. In this model, the resolution of ambiguities happens in the message processor; however, to achieve this the processor has no access to general conceptual knowledge (e.g., real-world