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Syntactic ambiguity and ambiguity avoidance in language comprehension and production

ORCiD logo with link | University of Potsdam
Published online: 5 January 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.24032.fel
Abstract
It has often been argued that ambiguity plays a role in language change, but the cognitive mechanisms and constraints that might facilitate ambiguity-related change are as yet poorly understood. In this article I discuss syntactic ambiguity and its potential role in grammatical change in the contexts of real-time language comprehension and production. In order to comprehend in real-time, readers or listeners usually process syntactically ambiguous strings of words as if they were unambiguous. Syntactic change may come about when innovative syntactic analyses are computed during comprehension and later spread and are incorporated into the grammar. Although ambiguity will not normally be a problem for language producers, avoiding ambiguity in language production may be motivated by audience design considerations. Experimental evidence for speakers choosing to avoid syntactic ambiguity is mixed, however. Psycholinguistic models that propose a tight link between real-time production and comprehension offer an integrative perspective on ambiguity avoidance and its possible role in language change.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Syntactic ambiguity in comprehension and grammatical change
    • 2.1Real-time syntactic ambiguity resolution
    • 2.2Ambiguity, adaptation, and gradient change
    • 2.3Misparsing unambiguous input
    • 2.4Summary
  • 3.Syntactic ambiguity avoidance in production and grammatical change
    • 3.1Real-time language production
    • 3.2Ambiguity avoidance as audience design
    • 3.3Summary
  • 4.Linking production and comprehension
    • 4.1Integrated models
    • 4.2German infinitival complementation as a test case
    • 4.3Summary
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
References (103)
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