10 | Syntactic sentence processing

Question 1

Derivational theory of complexity

What factors make a sentence more complex to process

Answer 1

Complexity is increased by

• passive
• negation
• word order(Sub,Verb,Obj vs. Obj,Verb, Sub)

Question 2

Clausal hypothesis

Answer 2

We divide sentences into clauses by chunking them

Usually by Verb phrases

Question 3

Phoneme monitoring

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

How does Prosody and punctuation effect proccesing?

Answer 4

It can change how we interprit the sentence:

What is this thing called love?
What is this thing called, love?
What, is this thing called love?

Question 5

Garden path

Answer 5

Leads the listener/reader to an incorrect interpretation of the sentence

Newspaper headlines:

• Man held over betting shop killings freed
• Eye drops off shelf
• Two sisters reunited after 18 years in checkout queue

Question 6

Sausage machine

Answer 6

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)

Question 7

Parsing strategies

Answer 7

Late closure

Minimal attachment

Right Association

Question 8

Late closure

Answer 8

When possible, attach material intro the clause or phrase currently being processed.

Question 9

Minimal attachment

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Right Association

Answer 10

New nodes are preferably attached to the lowest node.

If the LC and MA does not indicate otherwise…

Question 11

Category ambiguity

Answer 11

A word can be of multiple categories

walk (noun or verb?)

Question 12

Recency Principle

Answer 12

Preference to attach materiel to a recent point in the preding structure. (Alternative: The cost is a greater processing cost with more distant attachments)

The lamp near the painting of | the house that was damaged in the flood |

Question 13

Predicate Proximity

Answer 13

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