Abstract: Human beings tend to choose the structure with the minimum dependency distance during ambiguous structure understanding in order to reduce the burden on working memory. This paper reanalyzes the psychological experimental results within the framework of dependency grammar. The measurement of dependency distance provides the linguistic criteria for why is the potential ambiguity structure “VP+N1+the+N2” considered as the Modifier-Noun Construction（MNC） rather than Narrative-Object Structure（NOS）. Minimizing dependency distance is an important mechanism during natural language understanding and an effective way to reduce the memory cost.

Key words: dependency grammar, dependency distance, working memory, ambiguous structure, syntactic analysis

摘要： 用依存句法分析汉语歧义结构发现人脑在句法加工时倾向选择最小化依存距离的句法结构。该发现从依存理论角度解释了以往依照短语结构句法分析潜在歧义结构“VP+N1+的+N2”无法说明心理学实验结果的原因，找到了歧义结构实时阅读过程中倾向选择特定句法结构的语言学依据。最小化依存距离的认知机制是降低言语工作记忆成本的有效方法，是言语理解过程中的重要机制之一。

关键词: 依存句法, 依存距离, 言语工作记忆, 歧义结构, 句法分析