Structure of sentences - SM2

Question 1

What is grammar?

Answer 1

a mutually agreed convention about sentence structure to allow multiple concepts to be piped through a linear system (the sentence)

Question 2

What did Mahowald et al (2022) find when they tested participants’ understanding of jumbled sentences?

Answer 2

correct interpretation ~87% of the time (so we need grammar only 13% of the time)

Question 3

What is the goal of sentence processing?

Answer 3

to assign thematic roles to words

Question 4

What is the thing that does the action called? What is the thing that has the action done to it/them called?

Answer 4

• agent
• patient/recipient

Question 5

What is parsing?

Answer 5

working out the roles of each word in a sentence

Question 6

Why is parsing different from word recognition? (2)

Answer 6

• we don’t have a store of all possible sentences in our head so it is a constructive process, rather than recognition
• allows us to meaningfully deal with novel sentences (novel words would just not make sense)

Question 7

What is recursion?

Answer 7

phrases within phrases that can go on endlessly to make endless sentences

Question 8

What are syntactic tree structures?

Answer 8

• used to show the grammar of a sentence
• sentences should fit in one to be grammatically correct

Question 9

When does syntactic ambiguity occur?

Answer 9

when a sentence may be generated in more than one way by phrase structure rules

Question 10

What is attachment ambiguity?

Answer 10

the ambiguous phrase (like with the umbrella) could attach to multiple different phrases (like the girl or the man)

Question 11

What is local ambiguity?

Answer 11

the ambiguity is resolved by the end of the sentence

Question 12

What is global ambiguity?

Answer 12

the ambiguity is not resolved by the end of the sentence

Question 13

What is incrementality?

Answer 13

The idea that a sentence is interpreted word-by-word

Question 14

What was found when participants had to to finish sentences about ‘landing planes’? Which model does this support?

Answer 14

faster at responding to appropriate words than inappropriate (is or are)
supports the incremental model

Question 15

What are the main points of the garden path theory?

Answer 15

• incremental (words assigned roles as they are said)
• serial (one possibility considered at a time)
• autonomous (parser doesn’t use sentence context)
• innate (strategies generic across languages)

Question 16

What are the two ambiguity resolution strategies in the garden path theory?

Answer 16

• minimal attachment
• late closure

Question 17

What is minimal attachment?

Answer 17

adopt the analysis that requires the fewest nodes (simplest tree diagram)

Question 18

What is late closure? When is it used?

Answer 18

attach material into the most recently constructed phrase marker
used when the number of nodes is the same in both options so you can’t use minimal attachment

Question 19

What improves people’s performance on ‘the horse raced past the barn fell’?

Answer 19

Explaining first that there are multiple horses and one of them was being raced past the barn (context)