Sentence processing Flashcards
Parsing:
Analyzing an input string of words into a syntactic structure
Sentence processing:
Includes parsing, general term
The parser/ processor
Mechanism in the human brain that performs speech processing functions such as parsing
The garden path model
- A syntactic parsing principle
- ambiguous region causes confusion after a disambiguating region that breaks expectations follows it
- misleading sentences that lead to one expectation (the single structure), which is shown to be incorrect (requires reanalysis)
- a two stage model
- processor constructs on structure first as words come in, later has to reanalyze if needed in the second stage
- processor builds the simplest structure compatible with input, which includes late closure and minimal attachment
Late closure
Attach incoming GP material within phrase you are working on
The lowest possible nonterminal node dominating the last item analyzed
In the GP model, you close off phrases earlier than you need to
Minimal attachment
Attach incoming material into the phrase marker being constructed, using the fewest possible nodes (while respecting the rules of the language)
You mentally construct one thing when you hear a GP sentence, but it ends up defying the simplest solution
Minimal attachment is violated when an extra structure is added without evidence/ expectation
How does reanalysis proceed?
!! Selective reanalysis
- the parser uses all available information to locate the source of error/ confusion.
Predictions in GPT
Varies depending on ease of recovery/ reanalysis
Some sentences make it easier to reanalyze from the disambiguating cue
Pragmatics
Branch of linguistics studying how language is used, and how it is integrated into a context (linguistic and non-linguistic)
Presuppositions
Something that is being assumed, or presupposed by an utterance, rather than being explicitly stated
Even if you negate a sentence, the presupposition (assumption) remains
Presuppositions and relative clauses
Restrictive relative clauses serve to pick one entity out of a set
Tends to presuppose that there are multiple of something, for example
Processing in context slides
slides 55, 56
Does the visual context affect how we process sentences in real time?
Yes
Eye movement is reflects our processing of a sentence
Pragmatic context
Whether presuppositions are supported by the current discourse
Visual context
The visual scene can support the use of a modifier like “on the towel” in the eye tracking task.
Can the frequency with which a word appears in a certain
construction influence processing?
Frequency as determined though a corpus search or a
completion task.
Lexical preferences, parsing, and plausability
- The bias of a verb toward an NP or clausal (S) object matters in sentence parsing.
- Verbs that are biased toward a clausal object show less evidence of a garden path effect.
- Plausibility of an NP as an NP direct object did not influence parsing significantly (in this study!)
Reduced Relative clause ambiguities
skip
Digging-in effects
When multiple constraints conspire, the disfavored interpretation is inhibited
After the Martians invaded the town was evacuated.
VS
After the martians invaded the town that the city bordered was evacuated.
Constrained-based accounts:
Model that proposes:
- that multiple structures/ representations are built in parallel and weighted over time
- all sources of information are used simultaneously
- strongly interactive models
Problems for constraint-based models
- Constraint-based models typically predict longer processing times for balanced ambiguous regions.
- Typically these are not found in experiments of sentence processing (See Staub & Clifton, 2008 for a review).
»> BUT cf. Green & Mitchell (2006) - how often are ambiguities truly balanced?
Hybrid accounts
Alternative theory for processing ambiguous sentences, alternative to the garden path model and constraint-based model
