Syntax First Models

• Syntax-first models (e.g., Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Frazier & Clifton, 1996) have traditionally proposed that, at a point of syntactic ambiguity, syntactic heuristics alone select a single structure to pursue
• recovery from a misanalysis is achieved via a separate reanalysis mechanism that uses semantic and contextual information
• propose that only one representation is active at any given time and that nonsyntactic information only influences interpretation at a later reanalysis stage.