scholarly journals Ambiguous Sentence Processing in Translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-176
Author(s):  
Jason Omar Ruíz ◽  
Pedro Macizo
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Ambiguous Sentence ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Structure Representation ◽  
Co Activation ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
L1 English

Abstract The goal of our research was to explore the possible online co-activation of both the target language (TL) syntactic structure representation and TL attachment strategies in translation, and to look over a possible interaction between both syntactic properties. To this purpose, Spanish (L1) – English (L2) bilinguals were instructed to read complex noun phrases with an ambiguous relative clause in Spanish to either repeat them in Spanish or translate them into English. The final word of the sentences and the syntactic congruency between the source language (SL) and TL syntactic structure were manipulated. The results revealed co-activation of both TL syntactic properties: participants interpreted sentences more accordingly to the TL preferred strategy (low attachment) in the reading for translation task, read congruent sentences faster, and used the TL preferred interpretation strategy in the congruent condition of the sentences more. These results indicated TL activation at different syntactic levels during comprehension of the SL in translation.

scholarly journals A Cartographic Analysis of the Syntactic Structure of Mandarin Ba

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-154
Author(s):  
Yangyu Sun
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Decomposition Method ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Head Position ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Functional Head ◽  
Syntactic Representation ◽  
Event Decomposition ◽  
Syntactic Properties

Abstract This paper analyzes the syntactic properties of the “ba-construction” or “disposal form” in Mandarin Chinese under new theoretical frameworks. By introducing the event-decomposition method proposed by Ramchand (2008), it argues that the ba-construction conveys the causativity and the resultativity of the event at the same time, which can be shown from the syntactic representation. Then, this paper tests the position of ba, assuming that it is a functional head, and the result of the test indicates that ba is a voice head in the hierarchy of functional projections proposed by Cinque (1999, 2006). The final word order of a ba-construction can be derived by the argument movement of the direct object and by a head movement of ba or by the merge of ba at the head position of the higher functional head of a split VoiceP.

scholarly journals The Correlation Between Performances Among Lexical-Related Tasks and The Performance in The Sentence Construction Task

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Azwar Abidin
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Naming Task ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Lexical Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Judgment ◽  
Sentence Construction ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Construction Task

This study employed a quantitative correlational design to explore the correlation between the students' performances among lexical-related tasks and how these tasks affect the performance in a sentence construction task. Using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 22’s Pearson Partial Correlation Test, this study calculated participants' performance in primary lexical attributes by recognizing the following aspects of lexical knowledge: pronunciation patterns, morphological structures, syntactic properties, semantic characteristics such as abstract and interconnectedness, and a complete sentence construction in a strict naturalistic classroom setting. The test results showed that the participants made 297.05 seconds on average for 42 correct responses in Lexical Decision Task, 5.88 seconds per picture projected on the screen in Picture-Naming Task, 8.33 seconds for each word in Semantic Judgment Task, and 30.17 seconds on average to complete a sentence. These results concluded that the participants' performance in identifying strings of letters does not correlate significantly with their performance in understanding how a particular word functions grammatically within a sentence. In terms of the level of automaticity, the participants’ performance exceeded the average performance. The findings suggested that their performance in understanding primary lexical attributes in single lexicons does not facilitate their understanding of semantic characteristics. Henceforth, the students’ lexical knowledge does not yet construct an integrated linguistic representation in the target language acquisition. The study confirmed previous evidence that stated that a better performance in lexical-related tasks significantly impacted sentence processing and construction skill.

scholarly journals Subject encodings and retrieval interference

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Arnett ◽  
Matthew Wagers
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Retrieval Cues ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Retrieval Interference ◽  
Processing Difficulty

Interference has been identified as a cause of processing difficulty in linguistic dependencies, such as the subject-verb relation (Van Dyke and Lewis, 2003). However, while mounting evidence implicates retrieval interference in sentence processing, the nature of the retrieval cues involved - and thus the source of difficulty - remains largely unexplored. Three experiments used self-paced reading and eye-tracking to examine the ways in which the retrieval cues provided at a verb characterize subjects. Syntactic theory has identified a number of properties correlated with subjecthood, both phrase-structural and thematic. Findings replicate and extend previous findings of interference at a verb from additional subjects, but indicate that retrieval outcomes are relativized to the syntactic domain in which the retrieval occurs. One, the cues distinguish between thematic subjects in verbal and nominal domains. Two, within the verbal domain, retrieval is sensitive to abstract syntactic properties associated with subjects and their clauses. We argue that the processing at a verb requires cue-driven retrieval, and that the retrieval cues utilize abstract grammatical properties which may reflect parser expectations.

scholarly journals Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (18) ◽  
pp. E3669-E3678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Nelson ◽  
Imen El Karoui ◽  
Kristof Giber ◽  
Xiaofang Yang ◽  
Laurent Cohen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Model Comparison ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Transition Probability ◽  
Middle Temporal Gyrus ◽  
Similar Amount ◽  
Gamma Power ◽  
The Brain

Although sentences unfold sequentially, one word at a time, most linguistic theories propose that their underlying syntactic structure involves a tree of nested phrases rather than a linear sequence of words. Whether and how the brain builds such structures, however, remains largely unknown. Here, we used human intracranial recordings and visual word-by-word presentation of sentences and word lists to investigate how left-hemispheric brain activity varies during the formation of phrase structures. In a broad set of language-related areas, comprising multiple superior temporal and inferior frontal sites, high-gamma power increased with each successive word in a sentence but decreased suddenly whenever words could be merged into a phrase. Regression analyses showed that each additional word or multiword phrase contributed a similar amount of additional brain activity, providing evidence for a merge operation that applies equally to linguistic objects of arbitrary complexity. More superficial models of language, based solely on sequential transition probability over lexical and syntactic categories, only captured activity in the posterior middle temporal gyrus. Formal model comparison indicated that the model of multiword phrase construction provided a better fit than probability-based models at most sites in superior temporal and inferior frontal cortices. Activity in those regions was consistent with a neural implementation of a bottom-up or left-corner parser of the incoming language stream. Our results provide initial intracranial evidence for the neurophysiological reality of the merge operation postulated by linguists and suggest that the brain compresses syntactically well-formed sequences of words into a hierarchy of nested phrases.

Efficient Phrase Table pruning for Hindi to English machine translation through syntactic and marker-based filtering and hybrid similarity measurement

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-210
Author(s):  
NILADRI CHATTERJEE ◽  
SUSMITA GUPTA
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Verbal Learning ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Maximum Efficiency ◽  
Similarity Measurement ◽  
Translation System ◽  
Training Corpus ◽  
Generative Process

AbstractFor a given training corpus of parallel sentences, the quality of the output produced by a translation system relies heavily on the underlying similarity measurement criteria. A phrase-based machine translation system derives its output through a generative process using a Phrase Table comprising source and target language phrases. As a consequence, the more effective the Phrase Table is, in terms of its size and the output that may be derived out of it, the better is the expected outcome of the underlying translation system. However, finding the most similar phrase(s) from a given training corpus that can help generate a good quality translation poses a serious challenge. In practice, often there are many parallel phrase entries in a Phrase Table that are either redundant, or do not contribute to the translation results effectively. Identifying these candidate entries and removing them from the Phrase Table will not only reduce the size of the Phrase Table, but should also help in improving the processing speed for generating the translations. The present paper develops a scheme based on syntactic structure and the marker hypothesis (Green 1979, The necessity of syntax markers: two experiments with artificial languages, Journal of Verbal Learning and Behavior) for reducing the size of a Phrase Table, without compromising much on the translation quality of the output, by retaining the non-redundant and meaningful parallel phrases only. The proposed scheme is complemented with an appropriate similarity measurement scheme to achieve maximum efficiency in terms of BLEU scores. Although designed for Hindi to English machine translation, the overall approach is quite general, and is expected to be easily adaptable for other language pairs as well.

Learning to parse and its implications for language acquisition

2007 ◽  
pp. 634-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Trueswell ◽  
Lila R. Gleitman
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Adult Listener ◽  
Processing Abilities ◽  
Time Reading ◽  
Theory Of Language

This article describes what is known about the adult end-state, namely, that the adult listener recovers the syntactic structure of an utterance in real-time via interactive probabilistic parsing procedures. It examines evidence indicating that similar mechanisms are at work quite early during language learning, such that infants and toddlers attempt to parse the speech stream probabilistically. In the case of learning, though, the parsing is in aid of discovering relevant lower-level linguistic formatives such as syllables and words. Experimental observations about child sentence-processing abilities are still quite sparse, owing in large part to the difficulty in applying adult experimental procedures to child participants; reaction time, reading, and linguistic judgement methods have all have been attempted with children. The article discusses real-time sentence processing in adults, experimental exploration of child sentence processing, eye movements during listening and the kindergarten-path effect, verb biases in syntactic ambiguity resolution, prosody and lexical biases in child parsing, parsing development in a head-final language, and the place of comprehension in a theory of language acquisition.

scholarly journals Lexical selection, cross-language interaction, and switch costs in habitually codeswitching bilinguals

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
SOUAD KHEDER ◽  
EDITH KAAN
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Lexical Selection ◽  
Semantic Constraints ◽  
Switch Costs ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Language Context ◽  
Cross Language ◽  
Ecological Methodology

Bilinguals dynamically activate lexical items in one or both languages depending on a number of factors. We explored the interaction effects of semantic constraints, language context, and L2-proficiency on cross-language interaction and switch costs in bilinguals who habitually codeswitch between Algerian Arabic (AA) and French. We recorded response times to French cognates and non-cognates embedded in auditory AA or French sentences. High proficiency bilinguals could restrict selection to the target language regardless of the language context. In lower proficiency bilinguals, however, selection was specific to the target language in non-switching contexts but was nonspecific in switching contexts where cross-language interaction yielded inhibitory and facilitatory cognate effects. Results of this study therefore suggest that lexical selection in codeswitching bilinguals is dynamic and is dependent on proficiency, semantic constraints and language context. This within-subject study using auditory stimuli contributes towards a more ecological methodology in investigating sentence processing in codeswitching bilinguals.

scholarly journals Sentence Syntax and Content in the Human Temporal Lobe: An fMRI Adaptation Study in Auditory and Visual Modalities

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1000-1012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Dominique Devauchelle ◽  
Catherine Oppenheim ◽  
Luigi Rizzi ◽  
Stanislas Dehaene ◽  
Christophe Pallier
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Adaptation Effect ◽  
Separate Experiment ◽  
Actual Object ◽  
In Series ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Fmri Adaptation ◽  
Processing Network ◽  
Human Temporal Lobe

Priming effects have been well documented in behavioral psycholinguistics experiments: The processing of a word or a sentence is typically facilitated when it shares lexico-semantic or syntactic features with a previously encountered stimulus. Here, we used fMRI priming to investigate which brain areas show adaptation to the repetition of a sentence's content or syntax. Participants read or listened to sentences organized in series which could or not share similar syntactic constructions and/or lexico-semantic content. The repetition of lexico-semantic content yielded adaptation in most of the temporal and frontal sentence processing network, both in the visual and the auditory modalities, even when the same lexico-semantic content was expressed using variable syntactic constructions. No fMRI adaptation effect was observed when the same syntactic construction was repeated. Yet behavioral priming was observed at both syntactic and semantic levels in a separate experiment where participants detected sentence endings. We discuss a number of possible explanations for the absence of syntactic priming in the fMRI experiments, including the possibility that the conglomerate of syntactic properties defining “a construction” is not an actual object assembled during parsing.

Conciliating States and Locations: Towards a More Comprehensive and In- Depth Account of the Spanish Copula Estar

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ma. Eugenia Mangialavori
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Integrative Analysis ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Selectional Restrictions ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
Spatial Domains ◽  
Structural Analogy ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Copular Clauses

AbstractThe case of estar may reveal how different proposals of study have failed to grasp grammatically relevant semantic features shared by its occurrences. The results of this study indicate that an integrative analysis of estar clauses would account not only for the consistent lexical properties observed - comprising (a)analogous lexical-syntactic structure predicting possible copular complements, (b)analogous selectional restrictions and (c)interpretative effects -, but also for the complementary distribution of two aspectually nontrivial verbal alternations (ser / estar and estar / haber). Our proposal lays on the standard syntactic structure of copular clauses - assumed to embrace locative clauses, against what traditional Spanish grammar suggests - in combination with (i) the structural analogy between estar’s alternative complements (APs and PPs) and (ii) the understanding of states as abstract spatial domains (be at). Thus, the eventual differences between clauses like ‘estoy triste’ and ‘estoy en casa’ could be accounted for by virtue of the semantic / syntactic properties of the lexical head selected.

SYNTACTIC TRANSFORMATIONS IN TRANSLATING A SCIENCE ARTICLE

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-80
Author(s):  
O. O. Mykhailenko
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Professional Competence ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
Highly Qualified ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Original Sentence ◽  
Language Norms ◽  
Science Article

Publishing the research results in a science article with an international professional journal is an optimal way of sharing the information about newest discoveries in the world of science and technology. Not all scientists have a command of English sufficient for writing a science article, in compliance with high language requirements of leading scientific journals. So, the services of highly-qualified translators of scientific texts into English are in great request, and Ukraine is not an exception. Apart from the basic components of translator’s professional competence, especially important is the knowledge of norms of the modern English language scientific discourse. A translator of scientific texts is to have solid knowledge of grammar of source and target languages, regularities in rendering grammar forms and constructions, translation transformations. The largest number of grammar problems in translation is related to understanding the syntactic structure of sentences and a translator’s ability to make necessary transformations. Our research was aimed at analyzing the role of syntactic transformations in reaching the adequacy in English translation of Ukrainian language articles from scientometric journals. The analysis proved that the majority of syntactic transformations were used to bring the source text in conformity with the target language norms. The measure of translation transformations was generally adequate, though there were cases of non-use of syntactic transformations where they were necessary. Grammar literalism was also observed, due to translator’s insufficient understanding of the sentence structure, lack of knowledge of grammar peculiarities of the target language and translation solutions available for solving a particular translation problem. A translator of scientific texts should be particularly attentive to the syntax of the original sentence, analyse it properly, identify grammar phenomena that may cause translation problems and may need syntactic transformations, and build a translated sentence in accordance with the science language norms.

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