scholarly journals The resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism

Author(s):  
Gerry Altmann
Cognition ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Gibson ◽  
Neal Pearlmutter ◽  
Enriqueta Canseco-Gonzalez ◽  
Gregory Hickok

2004 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Tadeu Gonçalves ◽  
Luiz Arthur Pagani

O presente artigo trata das chamadas sentenças-labirinto, mostrando que, em casos em que a entoação e a estrutura informacional são suficientemente claras, a ambigüidade gerada pelo mencionado efeito não ocorre. O artigo contribui para a área do processamento lingüístico humano mostrando que, quando faladas, as sentenças das quais se esperam problemas de processamento sérios podem não apresentar tais problemas. A partir de um modelo teórico chamado Gramática Categorial Combinatória, mostramos como o processamento incremental de sentenças é ajudado pelas informações prosódicas e informacionais na atribuição de estrutura gramatical adequada a sentenças tradicionalmente consideradas “labirinto”. Garden-path effect beyond syntax: eliminating ambiguity Abstract The present article deals with the so-called garden-path effect. Traditionally, garden-path sentences are those that cause serious problem for the mental parser during processing and, although they are perfectly grammatical, there is no attribution of grammatical structure to them. We try to show that, when spoken, the garden-path sentences may not present the same kind of problem to the human sentence processing mechanism. In this paper we show how sufficiently informative data regarding prosody and informational structure can help the parser attribute correct grammatical structure to garden-path sentences when they are spoken. Using a framework called Combinatory Categorial Grammar, we show how incremental interpretation of garden-path sentences can be helped by prosody and informational structure during the processing of such sentences.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Dillon ◽  
Caroline Andrews ◽  
Caren M. Rotello ◽  
Matthew Wagers

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is parallel (i.e. it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or serial (i.e. it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question has proven difficult to address for both theoretical and methodological reasons (Gibson & Pearlmutter, 2000; Lewis, 2000). In the present study, we reassess this question from a novel perspective. We investigated the well-known ambiguity advantage effect (Traxler, Pickering & Clifton, 1998) in a speeded acceptability judgment task. We adopted a Signal Detection Theoretic approach to these data, with the goal of determining whether speeded judgment responses were conditioned on one or multiple syntactic analyses. To link these results to incremental parsing models, we developed formal models to quantitatively evaluate how serial and parallel parsing models should impact perceived sentence acceptability in our task. Our results suggest that speeded acceptability judgments are jointly conditioned on multiple parses of the input, a finding that is overall more consistent with parallel parsing models than serial models. Our study thus provides a new, psychophysical argument for co-active parses during language comprehension.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerry T. M. Altmann ◽  
Jelena Mirković

2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-477
Author(s):  
Ngoni Chipere

This book attempts to integrate symbolic processing, in the form of minimalism, with connectionism. Minimalism represents sentences as symbolic structures resulting from a formal process of syntactic derivation. Connectionism, on the other hand, represents sentences as patterns of association between linguistic features. These patterns are said to obey statistical regularities of linguistic usage instead of formal linguistic rules. The authors of the book argue that human sentence processing displays both structural and statistical characteristics and therefore requires the integration of the two views.


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