Through recording the streaming x, y coordinates of computer-mouse movements, we report evidence that visual context provides an immediate constraint on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity in the visual-world paradigm. This finding converges with previous eye-tracking results that support a constraint-based account of sentence processing, in which multiple partially-active syntactic alternatives compete against one another with the help of not only syntactic, semantic, and statistical factors, but also nonlinguistic factors such as visual context. Eye-tracking results in the visual-world paradigm are consistent with theories that posit limited interaction between context and syntax, but they are still consistent with related theories that allow immediate interaction but require serial pursuit of syntactic structures, such as the unrestricted race model. To tease apart the constraint-based and unrestricted-race accounts of sentence processing, the distribution of computer-mouse trajectories was analyzed for evidence of two populations of trials: those where only the correct parse was pursued and those where only the incorrect parse was pursued. We found no evidence of bimodality in the distribution of trajectory curvatures. Simulations with a constraint-based model produced trajectories that matched the human data. A nonlinguistic control study demonstrated the mouse-tracking paradigm's ability to elicit bimodal distributions of trajectory curvatures in certain experimental conditions. With effects of context posing a challenge for syntax-first models, and the absence of bimodality in the distribution of garden-path magnitude posing a challenge for unrestricted-race models, these converging methods support the constraint-based theory's account that the reason diverse contextual factors are able to bias one or another parse at the point of ambiguity is because those syntactic alternatives are continually partially-active in parallel, not discretely winnowed.

中文翻译：

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句法花园路径中的渐变和视觉上下文

通过记录计算机鼠标运动的流 x、y 坐标，我们报告了视觉上下文对视觉世界范式中句法歧义的解决提供直接约束的证据。这一发现与先前支持基于约束的句子处理解释的眼动追踪结果一致，其中多个部分主动句法替代方案不仅在句法、语义和统计因素的帮助下相互竞争，而且在非语言因素的帮助下例如视觉上下文。视觉世界范式中的眼动追踪结果与假设上下文和句法之间有限交互的理论一致，但它们仍然与允许直接交互但需要连续追求句法结构的相关理论一致，比如无限制种族模式。为了区分句子处理的基于约束和无限制种族的解释，分析了计算机鼠标轨迹的分布，以获取两种试验群体的证据：那些只追求正确解析的人和只追求不正确解析的人. 我们没有发现轨迹曲率分布存在双峰性的证据。使用基于约束的模型进行的模拟产生了与人类数据相匹配的轨迹。一项非语言控制研究证明了鼠标跟踪范式能够在某些实验条件下引发轨迹曲率的双峰分布。由于上下文的影响对语法优先模型构成挑战，