Journal ArticleDOI
Tense, Temporal Context, and Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution.
TLDR
The time course of this process of sentence comprehension was investigated by examining whether the usual bias to initially interpret a participial verb in a reduced relative clause as a past-tense verbs in a main clause would be reduced or eliminated when the temporal properties of the discourse are inconsistent with a Past-Tense interpretation.Abstract:
During sentence comprehension, events denoted by verbs must be related to other events already established in the discourse. This often requires the tense of a verb to be evaluated in relation to specific temporal properties of the discourse. We investigated the time course of this process by examining whether the usual bias to initially interpret a participial verb in a reduced relative clause as a past-tense verb in a main clause would be reduced or eliminated when the temporal properties of the discourse are inconsistent with a past-tense interpretation. In Experiment 1, the subjects completed fragments such as The student spotted when they appeared in contexts containing events occurring in the future or events occurring in the past. The fragments were typically completed as main clauses (e.g. The student spotted - the proctor in the past contexts, and as relative clauses (e.g. The student spotted by the proctor in the future contexts. In Experiments 2 and 3, the subjects read target sentence...read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution
TL;DR: Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.
Journal ArticleDOI
The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children.
TL;DR: Results from a new method for studying children's moment-by-moment language processing abilities, in which a head-mounted eye-tracking system was used to monitor eye movements as participants responded to spoken instructions, revealed systematic differences in how children and adults process spoken language.
Journal ArticleDOI
Modeling the Influence of Thematic Fit (and Other Constraints) in On-line Sentence Comprehension
TL;DR: This article explored the time course with which readers use event-specific world knowledge (thematic fit) to resolve structural ambiguity through experiments and implementation of constraint-based and two-stage models.
Journal ArticleDOI
Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability
TL;DR: In this paper, the MAGNITUDE ESTIIMATION, a technique used in psychophysics, can be adapted for eliciting acceptability judgments, which can solve the measurement scale problems which plague conventional techniques and provide data which make fine distinctions robustly enough to yield statistically significant results of linguistic interest.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation
Dan Jurafsky,Dan Jurafsky +1 more
TL;DR: This article proposed a probabilistic approach for the access and disambiguation of linguistic knowledge, based on a parallel parser which ranks constructions for access, and interpretations for disambigation, by their conditional probability.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness
TL;DR: Johnson-Laird as discussed by the authors argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us, and provides both a blueprint for building such a model and numerous important illustrations of how to do it.
Book
Mental models: towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness
TL;DR: Johnson-Laird as discussed by the authors argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us, and provides both a blueprint for building such a model and numerous important illustrations of how to do it.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Sausage Machine: A New Two-Stage Parsing Model.
Lyn Frazier,Janet Dean Fodor +1 more
TL;DR: It is proposed that the human sentence parsing device assigns phrase structure to word strings in two steps, and the assumption that the units which are shunted from the first stage to the second stage are defined by their length, rather than by their syntactic type explains the effects of constituent length on perceptual complexity in center embedded sentences.
Journal ArticleDOI
The independence of syntactic processing
TL;DR: This article found that syntactic processing biases remained even when they resulted in thematically based anomaly or when they conflicted with discourse biases, and argued that the data support the existence of a syntactical processing module.