10 | Syntactic sentence processing Flashcards
What is the clause hypothesis?
We divide sentences into clauses by chunking them.
What is phoneme monitoring?
The children [that were] playing in the hayloft startled the farmer’s wife.
Processing is easier/faster when explicit markers (“that where”) are NOT left out.
What is a garden path?
Leads the listener/reader to an incorrect interpretation of the sentence
The horse(which was) raced past the barn fell The car (which was) driven past… Because of the past tense and past participle is the same for “race” this leads to confusion.
What is a sausage machine?
Is a parser
Goal: Building a syntactic tree. (Phrase maker)
Parser is deterministic: Can only build one tree at a time.
Tries to keep the syntax as simple as possible
Tries not to leave too much material unattached (not building into the syntactic tree under construction)
Name three parsing strategies.
Late closure: When possible, attach material intro the clause or phrase currently being processed.
Minimal attachment: Attach incoming material into the phrase marker being constructed, using the fewest possible nodes consistent with the well-formedness rules of the language under consideration.
Right Association: New nodes are preferably attached to the lowest node.
If the LC and MA does not indicate otherwise…
What is the recency principle?
Preference to attach materiel to a recent point in the preding structure. (Alternative: The cost is a greater processing cost with more distant attachments)
What is predicate proximity?
Preference to attach relative clause to the NP that is closest to the verb in the main clause. (or otherwise that which is in the highest structure of the tree)
The lamp near the painting of the house that was damaged in the flood.
What was damaged?
