Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ambiguity inherent in natural language requires us to make many decisions about the meaning of what we hear or read. Yet most studies of natural language understanding have assumed that although language may be ambiguous, we always make the right choice when faced with a decision about ambiguity. Consequently, very little is said about how to recover from incorrect decisions. In this paper we look at two rare examples of investigations into recovering from erroneous decisions in resolving lexical ambiguity. After examining the corresponding theories, we find that what at first appear to be competing theories can in fact be resolved into a unified theory of lexical error recovery based upon a highly parallel architecture for language understanding.