Through analyses of text corpora, sentence completion, and self-paced reading, examined role of structurally defined parsing principles, local information (lexically specific biases), and contextual information (referential pragmatics) in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Subjects were 32 undergraduate native English speakers. Found that local and contextual information are first, and often only, mechanisms employed in resolving syntactic ambiguities. (Includes 58 references.) (JW)