Matthew Wagers, Brian Dillon · MIT Press eBooks · 2025
phenomena that are systematic but not explicable within the constructs manipulated by formal linguistics" (Fodor et al., 1974, p. 369).The identification of such phenomena triggered the development of theories aimed at explaining them.These theories elaborated on different aspects of the cognitive mechanisms that allow sentence recognition.For example, Kimball (1973) articulated a model of how short-term memory was used to represent syntactic structure.His model predicted a range of processing effects, including ambiguity resolution preferences and different types of reanalysis difficulty (see also Frazier & Fodor, 1978).In related work, Frazier (1979) proposed a set of processing principles based on a theoretical proposal of sentence processing.Her Garden Path Theory held that the comprehender sought to form a single, determinate analysis of the input at each point as quickly as possible.This led to comprehenders prioritizing less complex structures (e.g., minimal attachment) and more local structural attachments (e.g., late closure).Kimball's, Fodor's, and Frazier's models also advanced another key theoretical claim: that syntactic processing was relatively isolated from other processes involved in language comprehension.In other words, they claimed that syntactic analysis was modular in the sense of Fodor (1983).It was this provocative claim that drove much of the research in the 1980s, with researchers asking what extragrammatical factors, if any, could influence incremental sentence processing.There were vigorous empirical debates around the role of animacy, plausibility, verb subcategorization, frequency, and more.This research spurred the development of an alternative model of sentence processing, constraint-based parsing (MacDonald et al., 1994).This view rejected the idea of syntactic analysis as an isolated process and instead posited competitive, simultaneous interaction between multiple levels of representation as the central mechanism in syntactic recognition.Constraint-based parsing models also differed in another key aspect from the Garden Path Model.Whereas the Garden Path Model proposed that comprehenders were driven by the need to identify a single structure for the input, constraint-based parsing rejected this "serial" parsing assumption in favor of a "parallel" model.On this view, comprehenders activated multiple different structural analyses of the input, and ranked them by how well they satisfied a range of constraints (MacDonald et al., 1994).At the same time, another important development was the turn away from characterizing syntactic analysis processes in vacuo to situating syntactic analysis in a discourse context (Crain & Steedman, 1985;Tanenhaus et al., 1995).In a foundational study, Tanenhaus et al. (1995) showed that real-time syntactic analysis was guided by the referential potential of different analyses in a visual context.Figure 1 illustrates the highlyinfluential method they used.Structural analyses that permitted successful reference in context were prioritized over those that did not.This finding illustrated that the principles that determine how comprehenders recognize syntactic structure in real time cannot be purely derived from properties of syntactic rules or constraints: A structure's utility in a discourse context partially determines its priority in incremental structural analysis, a view that comports well with constraint-based parsing models.In a parallel development, experimental evidence suggesting a central role for prosody in cueing syntactic analysis came to the fore around the same
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TAMADLA, SAID · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2007
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Μαρία Μαρτζούκου · 2014
Κύριος σκοπός της διδακτορικής διατριβής ήταν να ερευνηθεί το αν οι τυπικά αναπτυγμένοι ενήλικες, φυσικοί ομιλητές της ελληνικής χρησιμοποιούν την προσωδία τόσο στην παραγωγή, όσο και στην κατανόηση συντακτικά αμφίσημων προτάσεων. Επιπλέον στόχος της έρευνας ήταν η μελέτη της προσωδίας (παραγωγή και κατανόηση) σε ενήλικες με Άσπεργκερ και η σύγκριση της ικανότητάς τους να χρησιμοποιούν τα προσωδιακά στοιχεία κατά την κατανόηση αμφίσημων προτάσεων (συντακτική προσωδία) και κατά την κατανόηση προτάσεων με ουδέτερο περιεχόμενο αλλά ειπωμένων με προσωδία που δηλώνει διάφορα συναισθήματα όπως χαρά, λύπη, θυμό, έκπληξη, φόβο και ουδετερότητα (συναισθηματική προσωδία). Αφορμή για την τελευταία σύγκριση ήταν το γεγονός ότι στη διεθνή βιβλιογραφία τα άτομα με Άσπεργκερ συχνά παρουσιάζονται ως ανίκανα να κατανοήσουν τα συναισθήματα των υπολοίπων ανθρώπων από τον τόνο της φωνής τους. Επομένως, θέλαμε να ελέγξουμε αν η αδυναμία τους αυτή επεκτείνεται και στην κατανόηση της συντακτικής προσωδίας. Για τους παραπάνω λόγους, διεξήχθη ένα πείραμα παραγωγής και ένα χρονομετρικό πείραμα κατανόησης, πρώτα σε 30 τυπικά αναπτυγμένους ενήλικες και μετά σε 20 ενήλικες με Άσπεργεκρ και 20 νευροτυπικούς (ομάδα έλεγχου) με τα ίδια χαρακτηριστικά με τα άτομα με Άσπεργεκρ, όσον αφορά στο φύλο, την ηλικία και τα χρόνια εκπαίδευσης. Στα πειράματα αυτά χρησιμοποιήθηκαν αμφίσημες προτάσεις Υποκειμένου / Αντικειμένου (π.χ. «Καθώς έραβε το κουμπί έπεσε στο πάτωμα»), δηλαδή προτάσεις στις οποίες η Φράση Προσδιοριστή (ΦΠρ) («το κουμπί») μπορούσε να ερμηνευτεί είτε ως αντικείμενο της δευτερεύουσας, είτε ως υποκείμενο της κύριας πρότασης. Στη δεύτερη ομάδα (20 τυπικά αναπτυγμένοι – 20 ενήλικες με Άσπεργκερ) διεξήχθη και ένα πείραμα κατανόησης συναισθηματικής προσωδίας. Τα αποτελέσματα έδειξαν ότι οι τυπικά αναπτυγμένοι ενήλικες χρησιμοποιούν διαφοροποιητική προσωδία προκειμένου να δηλώσουν τις δύο ερμηνείες των προτάσεων, αλλά όχι με συνέπεια. Αντιθέτως, κατά την κατανόηση δομικά αμφίσημων προτάσεων βασίζονται με συνέπεια (≈ 80%) στις προσωδιακές πληροφορίες. Όσον αφορά στους ενήλικες με Άσπεργκερ, τα αποτελέσματα έδειξαν ότι χρησιμοποίησαν λιγότερες φορές τα σωστά προσωδιακά στοιχεία (στατιστικά σημαντική διαφορά), ενώ αντιμετώπισαν προβλήματα ακόμα και στη σωστή παραγωγή της προσωδίας κατά την προφορά μη αμφίσημων προτάσεων (διασπαστές προσοχής). Τα προβλήματα αυτά ήταν εστιασμένα στις προτάσεις υποκειμένου, δηλαδή στις προτάσεις στις οποίες η ΦΠρ ήταν υποκείμενο της κύριας πρότασης. Παρόμοια ήταν τα αποτελέσματα και από το πείραμα κατανόησης, αφού τα άτομα με Άσπεργκερ είχαν συνολικά στατιστικά χαμηλότερα ποσοστά επιτυχίας, τα οποία όμως επίσης οφείλονταν στις δομές υποκειμένου. Επίσης, η δοκιμασία κατανόησης της συναισθηματικής προσωδίας έδειξε ότι οι ενήλικες με Άσπεργκερ είχαν στατιστικά σημαντικά χαμηλά ποσοστά στην κατανόηση της έκπληξης. Τέλος, στα άτομα με Άσπεργκερ βρέθηκε συσχέτιση ανάμεσα στην επίδοση τους στην κατανόηση της συντακτικής και της συναισθηματικής προσωδίας.Οι δομές υποκειμένου θεωρούνται ως πιο σύνθετες για τον επεξεργαστή από ό,τι οι δομές αντικειμένου, ενώ η αποκωδικοποίηση του συναισθήματος της έκπληξης μπορεί να είναι δύσκολη λόγω του ότι μπορεί να συνοδευτεί από άλλα, εκ διαμέτρου αντίθετα συναισθήματα, όπως η χαρά ή η λύπη. Επομένως, τα συνολικά αποτελέσματα δείχνουν ότι τα άτομα με Άσπεργκερ δυσκολεύονται με τις πιο απαιτητικές μορφές της συντακτικής και της συναισθηματικής προσωδίας, δηλαδή με τις δομές υποκειμένου και με το συναίσθημα της έκπληξης αντίστοιχα.
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Van Gompel, Roger P.G. · Psychology Press eBooks · 2013
<p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"/><p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with language impairments process sentences in the same way as healthy monolingual adults? These are just some of the many questions that sentence processing researchers have tried to answer by conducting ever more sophisticated experiments, making this one of the most productive and exciting areas in experimental language research in recent years. <p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"/><p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">This book is the first to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this important field. It contains 10 chapters written by world-leading experts, which discuss influential theories of sentence processing and important experimental evidence, with a focus on recent developments in the area. The chapters also analyse research that has investigated how people process the structure and meaning of sentences, and how sentences are understood within their context. <p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"/><p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">This comprehensive and authoritative work will appeal to students and researchers in the field of sentence processing, as well anyone with an interest in psychology and linguistics
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Albert E. Kim · 2018
Abstract Sentence processing is the study of the cognitive and neural processes that allow humans to comprehend multi‐word linguistic messages by combining the meanings of individual words compositionally into an interpretation that typically extends beyond the meanings of the individual words of the sentence. This process is arguably the signature property of human language; without this ability, we would possess merely an ability to send and receive one‐word signals, something that is not unusual in the animal world. This chapter reviews the essential theoretical assumptions and challenges of the field of sentence processing research, along with classic and recent findings concerning the cognitive and neural mechanisms that serve sentence processing.
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Sa’ad Alwan · Kufa Journal of Arts · 2008
Because the sentence is the basic unit of language, and to understand it is a prerequisite for understanding the supersentential levels of language, this study aims at investigating the structural properties of a sentence as well as the speaker-listener relationship which helps to establish a mutual understanding of each other’s intention. Besides, the present study also aims at finding out the reasons behind ambiguity in sentences and how to disambiguate such sentences. The study involves investigating the perceptual mechanisms utilized by the listener and helps him/ her to understand the meaning of the sentence he hears or listens to .If the listener understands what the speaker means or intends to convey, the conversation can continue and the speaker can realize his aim by encouraging the listener to establish a social relationship which is one of the basic functions of any human language. But if the listener fails to understand the speaker, no communication can continue between them. Not only this, but misunderstanding or misinterpreting the speaker lead to adverse results that may spoil social ties instead of enhancing them.
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Ton Dijkstra, David Peeters · 2023
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Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, David Britain et al. · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2009
Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students' understanding of the subject. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three main sections: sounds, words, and sentences. In each, the foundational concepts are introduced, along with their application to the fields of child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language disorders, and sociolinguistics, giving the book a unique yet simple structure that helps students to engage with the subject more easily than other textbooks on the market. This edition includes a completely new section on sentence use, including an introduction and discussion of core areas of pragmatics and conversational analysis; coverage of sociolinguistic topics, introducing communities of practice; a wealth of new exercise material and updated further reading.
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Merrill F. Garrett · 1990
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Carlos Acuña-Fariña · 2025
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Eye Tracking · 2014
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Tim Kunze (4640305), Andre D. H. Peterson (4640302), Jens Haueisen (191526) et al. · Figshare · 2017
<p>Afferent word information selectively excites a word-representing canonical microcircuit when the respective word is recognized in primary auditory areas. The activated microcircuit, for example representing the word ‘<i>I</i>’ and belonging to the subject module (S), pre-activates words in the connected verb-module (V) and, together with the selective afferent word information, activates another microcircuit (‘<i>eat</i>’). Now, words both in the module of verb-modifiers (V mod.) and in the module of objects (O) are differentially pre-activated by weighted connections. Contextual information is proposed to guide this input-driven structure-building process by modulating the excitability of a targeted microcircuit, such as, in our case, through inhibition.</p>
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Hemforth, Barbara, Konieczny, Lars · 2000
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Xinchi Yu · OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026
Data, stimuli and scripts for "Unleashing the potential of OPM-MEG to study event-related fields against low-frequency artifacts: the case of sentence processing"
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Arturo E. Hernández, Eva M. Fernández, Noemí Aznar-besé · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012
Abstract Bilinguals live in two linguistic worlds. Given the different demands of each language, one might think that each system functions independently. However, bilinguals do not behave like two monolingual speaker/listeners housed in a single brain. Instead, the evidence to date suggests that the characteristics of bilingual language processing may appear to be “in between” the individual's two codes. Studies in bilingual sentence processing have focused on phenomena related to how semantic or syntactic representations are built. This article reviews data consistent with the view of interdependence between the two languages of the bilingual, using evidence from the literature on bilingual sentence processing. Studies of both semantic processing and syntactic processing show that bilinguals almost always use a unitary mechanism which accesses two separately represented grammars. The study of bilingual sentence processing can also offer insights into our understanding of human language processing in general, because bilinguals offer opportunities to examine sentence processing effects in within-participant designs, impossible to carry out with monolinguals. In addition to the above, this article explores parsing, the age of language acquisition, and language proficiency.
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Psychology Press eBooks · 2015
Contents: C. Clifton, Jr., L. Frazier, K. Rayner, Introduction. Part I:Sentence Processing and the Brain. L. Osterhout, Event-Related Brain Potentials as Tools for Comprehending Language Comprehension. P. Hagoort, C. Brown, Brain Responses to Lexical Ambiguity Resolution and Parsing. Part II:Phonological Processing. P. Zwitserlood, Access to Phonological-Form Representations in Language Comprehension and Production. C.M. Connine, Vertical and Horizontal Similarity in Spoken-Word Recognition. Part III:Syntactic Processing: Information Flow and Decision Making. M.C. MacDonald, N.J. Pearlmutter, M.S. Seidenberg, Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution as Lexical Ambiguity Resolution. J.C. Trueswell, M.K. Tanenhaus, Toward a Lexicalist Framework of Constraint-Based Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution. E. Gibson, N.J. Pearlmutter, A Corpus-Based Analysis of Psycholinguistic Constraints on Prepositional-Phrase Attachment. M. Pickering, S. Barton, R. Shillcock, Unbounded Dependencies, Island Constraints, and Processing Complexity. M. Bader, I. Lasser, German Verb-Final Clauses and Sentence Processing: Evidence for Immediate Attachment. Part IV:Syntactic Processing and Computational Models. M.W. Crocker, On the Nature of the Principle-Based Sentence Processor. O. Rambow, A.K. Joshi, A Processing Model for Free Word-Order Languages. E.P. Stabler, The Finite Connectivity of Linguistic Structure. Part V:Referential Processing. S. Garrod, Resolving Pronouns and Other Anaphoric Devices: The Case for Diversity in Discourse Processing. W.S. Murray, S.P. Liversedge, Referential Context Effects on Syntactic Processing. J. Sedivy, M. Spivey-Knowlton, The Use of Structural, Lexical, and Pragmatic Information in Parsing Attachment Ambiguities. M. Spivey-Knowlton, M.K. Tanenhaus, Referential Context and Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution. Part VI:Sentence Processing and Language Acquisition. S. Crain, W. Ni, L. Conway, Learning, Parsing and Modularity.
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Susan Borsky, Lewis P. Shapiro · 1998
Although it is clear that all kinds of information affect sentence interpretation at some point, such initially context-independent processing could optimize speed and resources by reducing the cognitive and memory demands of including multiple sources of information that may not be needed. This chapter reports the outcome of a number of investigations of context effects in normal populations, and the kind of data that support different processing accounts. It presents the results of some recent experiments investigating context integration, and concludes with a discussion of the importance of the experimental task for interpreting data. The speed and efficiency of language comprehension demands that a theoretical model be equally rapid and efficient. Certainly, more cross-language experiments also help psycholinguists draw closer to the goal of discovering, describing, and ultimately of understanding the universal principles of human language.
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Matthew W. Crocker · Studies in theoretical psycholinguistics · 1996
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Pia Knoeferle, Matthew W. Crocker, Friedemann Pulvermüller · Brain and Language · 2009
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Matthew W. Crocker, Matthew W. Crocker · 1996
this paper we argued that one of the most salient properties of the human sentence parser was that it appears to operate incrementally. Both of the above algorithms are incremental in the sense that they process each word of the sentence one-by-one from left-to-right. But that only means they treat the input incrementally. If we assume, quite reasonably, that the output of the parser is a parse tree, and that this is to be used for subsequent semantic interpretation, then the two models differ substantially. In the case of the top-down parser there is a single `connected&apos; parse tree for the sentence after each word is processed (although it is not complete, until the end of the parse). In the bottom-up parser, however, adjacent constituents may be left on the stack for an arbitrarily long period. For example, the NP subject of a sentence will not be reduced with the VP (via the rule S \\Gamma! NP V P ) until after the entire VP has been parsed (in the above example, the VP only contains the verb, but typically it will also contain a number of complements). Under the standard assumption that we cannot begin to evaluate the semantics and plausibility, until these constituents are connected in the parse tree, the bottom-up parser will lead to a psychologically implausible delay in interpretation for all sentences (see Stabler (1991) for discussion). So from the standpoint of incrementality, the top-down parser fares much better than the bottom-up parser. The top-down parser, however, has problems of its own. To begin with, it attempts to construct large portions of the tree before even looking at the words in the sentence. In other words, given several (possibly dozens of) rules that expand a particular category, the parser simply has to choose one arbitrarily. Given that i...
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