Sentence Comprehension

Sentence Comprehension PDF Author: David J. Townsend
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262700801
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Using sentence comprehension as a case study for all of cognitive science, David Townsend and Thomas Bever offer an integration of two major approaches, the symbolic-computational and the associative-connectionist. The symbolic-computational approach emphasizes the formal manipulation of symbols that underlies creative aspects of language behavior. The associative-connectionist approach captures the intuition that most behaviors consist of accumulated habits. The authors argue that the sentence is the natural level at which associative and symbolic information merge during comprehension. The authors develop and support an analysis-by-synthesis model that integrates associative and symbolic information in sentence comprehension. This integration resolves problems each approach faces when considered independently. The authors review classic and contemporary symbolic and associative theories of sentence comprehension, and show how recent developments in syntactic theory fit well with the integrated analysis-by-synthesis model. They offer analytic, experimental, and neurological evidence for their model and discuss its implications for broader issues in cognitive science, including the logical necessity of an integration of symbolic and connectionist approaches in the field.

The On-line Study of Sentence Comprehension

The On-line Study of Sentence Comprehension PDF Author: Manuel Carreiras
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135423938
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
This book addresses important findings, assumptions, problems, hopes, and future guidelines on the use of advanced research techniques to study the moment-by-moment mental processes that occur while a reader or listener is understanding language. The core techniques are eye tracking and ERPs, with some extensions to others such as fMRI. The On-line Study of Sentence Comprehension has been written by top researchers in the field of psycholinguistics, who are also leading experts in the use of eye tracking and ERPs. This book combines comprehensive overviews of the state of the art on theoretical progress, the latest on assumptions behind the use of eye movements (reading and visual world) and ERPs methods with papers that address specific research questions. This work covers not only methodological issues but also discusses the theoretical progress in understanding language processing using temporally fine-grained methods.

Sentence Comprehension as a Cognitive Process

Sentence Comprehension as a Cognitive Process PDF Author: Shravan Vasishth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107589773
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Sentence comprehension - the way we process and understand spoken and written language - is a central and important area of research within psycholinguistics. This book explores the contribution of computational linguistics to the field, showing how computational models of sentence processing can help scientists in their investigation of human cognitive processes. It presents the leading computational model of retrieval processes in sentence processing, the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based retrieval mode, and develops a principled methodology for parameter estimation and model comparison/evaluation using benchmark data, to enable researchers to test their own models of retrieval against the present model. It also provides readers with an overview of the last 20 years of research on the topic of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension, along with source code that allows researchers to extend the model and carry out new research. Comprehensive in its scope, this book is essential reading for researchers in cognitive science.

Sentence Comprehension as a Cognitive Process

Sentence Comprehension as a Cognitive Process PDF Author: Shravan Vasishth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009064207
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Sentence comprehension - the way we process and understand spoken and written language - is a central and important area of research within psycholinguistics. This book explores the contribution of computational linguistics to the field, showing how computational models of sentence processing can help scientists in their investigation of human cognitive processes. It presents the leading computational model of retrieval processes in sentence processing, the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based retrieval mode, and develops a principled methodology for parameter estimation and model comparison/evaluation using benchmark data, to enable researchers to test their own models of retrieval against the present model. It also provides readers with an overview of the last 20 years of research on the topic of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension, along with source code that allows researchers to extend the model and carry out new research. Comprehensive in its scope, this book is essential reading for researchers in cognitive science.

Memory Limitations in Sentence Comprehension

Memory Limitations in Sentence Comprehension PDF Author: Sabrina Gerth
Publisher: Universitätsverlag Potsdam
ISBN: 3869563214
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This dissertation addresses the question of how linguistic structures can be represented in working memory. We propose a memory-based computational model that derives offline and online complexity profiles in terms of a top-down parser for minimalist grammars (Stabler, 2011). The complexity metric reflects the amount of time an item is stored in memory. The presented architecture links grammatical representations stored in memory directly to the cognitive behavior by deriving predictions about sentence processing difficulty. Results from five different sentence comprehension experiments were used to evaluate the model's assumptions about memory limitations. The predictions of the complexity metric were compared to the locality (integration and storage) cost metric of Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 2000). Both metrics make comparable offline and online predictions for four of the five phenomena. The key difference between the two metrics is that the proposed complexity metric accounts for the structural complexity of intervening material. In contrast, DLT's integration cost metric considers the number of discourse referents, not the syntactic structural complexity. We conclude that the syntactic analysis plays a significant role in memory requirements of parsing. An incremental top-down parser based on a grammar formalism easily computes offline and online complexity profiles, which can be used to derive predictions about sentence processing difficulty.

Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension

Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension PDF Author: Shravan Vasishth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317621190
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The first-ever investigation of sentence processing in Hindi, Working Memory in Sentence Comprehension studies the predictions of three existing, wide-coverage sentence processing models. In experiments that apply these models to Hindi, Shravan Vasishth develops a new sentence processing model that builds on existing theories and overcomes their empirical problems. Advancing the understanding of human parsing processes, this book is a landmark in cross-linguistic research, presenting a challenging set of sentence processing facts that will impact future theories.

Reanalysis in Sentence Processing

Reanalysis in Sentence Processing PDF Author: J. Fodor
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792350996
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
The topic addressed in this volume lies within the study of sentence processing, which is one of the major divisions of psycholinguistics. The goal has been to understand the structure and functioning of the mental mechanisms involved in sentence comprehension. Most of the experimental and theoretical work during the last twenty or thirty years has focused on 'first-pass parsing', the process of assigning structure to a sentence as its words are encountered, one at a time, 'from left to right' . One important guiding idea has been to delineate the processing mechanisms by studying where they fai!. For this purpose we identify types of sentences which perceivers have trouble assigning structure to. An important class of perceptually difficult senten ces are those which contain temporary ambiguities. Since the parsing mechanism cannot tell what the intended structure is, it may make an incorrect guess. Then later on in the sentence, the structure assignment process breaks down, because the later words do not fit with the incorrect structural analysis. This is called a 'garden path' situation. When it occurs, the parsing mechanism must somehow correct itself, and find a different analysis which is compatible with the incoming words. This reanalysis process is the subject of the research reported here.

The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing

The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing PDF Author: Paola Merlo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781588111562
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This volume highlights current theories of the lexicon from the perspective of its use in sentence understanding. It includes work from researchers in psycholinguistic studies on sentence comprehension.

Perspectives on Sentence Processing

Perspectives on Sentence Processing PDF Author: Charles Clifton, Jr.
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317780590
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
One of the liveliest forums for sharing psychological, linguistic, philosophical, and computer science perspectives on psycholinguistics has been the annual meeting of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. Documenting the state of the art in several important approaches to sentence processing, this volume consists of selected papers that had been presented at the Sixth CUNY Conference. The editors not only present the main themes that ran through the conference but also honor the breadth of the presentations from disciplines including linguistics, experimental psychology, and computer science. The variety of sentence processing topics examined includes: * how evoked brain potentials reflect sentence comprehension * how auditory words are processed * how various sources of grammatical and nongrammatical information are coordinated and used * how sentence processing and language acquisition might be related. This distinctive volume not only presents the most exciting current work in sentence processing, but also places this research into the broader context of theorizing about it.

Second Language Sentence Processing

Second Language Sentence Processing PDF Author: Alan Juffs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136217207
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This addition to the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition series presents a comprehensive review of the latest research findings on sentence processing in second language acquisition. The book begins with a broad overview of the core issues of second language sentence processing research and then narrows its focus by dedicating individual chapters to each of these key areas. While a number of publications have discussed research findings on knowledge of formal syntactic principles as part of theories of second language acquisition, there are fewer resources dedicated to the role of second language sentence processing in this context. This volume will act as the first full-length literature review of the field on the market.