L5 - Sentence comprehension

Question 1

What are the 3 theories of sentence parsing?

Answer 1

1. Syntactic Analysis -> Semantic Analysis:
   - Garden Path Model
2. Semantic Analysis -> Syntactic Analysis:
   - Good-enough processing.
3. Parallel Syntactic and Semantic Analysis:
   - Multiple constraints model.

Question 2

What is meant by local syntactic ambiguities?

Answer 2

• Multiple syntactic categories in a sentence can create ambiguities.
• “Time flies like an arrow”.
• Time = verb or noun.
• Flies = verb or noun.
• Like = verb or adverb.

Real world knowledge and probabilities can sometimes disambiguate meanings.

Question 3

What are Global Syntactic Ambiguities (Garden Path Sentences)?

Answer 3

• “The horse raced past the barn fell.”
• “The old man the boats.”
• Garden Path: initial syntactic analysis (parse) is incorrect so we must revise structure.

Question 4

What does the Garden Path Model (Frazier & Rayner, 1982) say about initial sentence selection?

Answer 4

• Only one structure is initially considered, based only on syntactic parsing (not meaning).
• The simplest ‘tree structure’ is chosen (fewest nodes in tree, fewest embedded structures).

Question 5

What is some evidence towards the Garden Path Model?

Answer 5

Eye movements in Garden Path Sentences:

- people spend longer on disambiguating material only if it contradicts the simplest reading (initial parse).

Question 6

What are the two predictions made by the Garden Path Model?

Answer 6

1. Parsing is serial and incremental:
   - syntactic role is assigned word by word.
2. Parsing is autonomous:
   - when ambiguity is encountered, select a single interpretation based on syntax only.

Question 7

What are some challenges to the predictions of the Garden Path Model?

Answer 7

• Eye movement data shows that people fixate longer on words that contradict sentence meaning.
• > semantic context does influence parsing.
• > challenges automaticity of parsing.

Question 8

What is “Good Enough” comprehension?

Answer 8

• Processing is sometimes faster for ambiguous than unambiguous sentences.
• Ambiguous: “The hunter killed the animal with the rifle.:
• Unambig: “The hunter killed the leopard with the rifle.”
• Goal of comprehension is a representation that is good enough for current task.

Question 9

What was the general finding from Swets (2008) on “Good-Enough” comprehension by manipulating comprehension demands?

Answer 9

• Found that people adopt a “good enough” strategy unless full sentence comprehension is required.

Question 10

What do Multiple Constraint Models say about sentence parsing?

Answer 10

• Parsing is parallel and interactive.
• Lexical knowledge includes syntactic information.
• Early activation of contextual/semantic knowledge.
• Interpretations compete for selection like TRACE model.
• Multiple parses evaluated simultaneously.
• Comprehension is a constructive process.