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  1. The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:e62.
    Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...)
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  • An integrated theory of language production and comprehension.Martin J. Pickering & Simon Garrod - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (4):329-347.
    Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume (...)
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  • Forward models and their implications for production, comprehension, and dialogue.Martin J. Pickering & Simon Garrod - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (4):377-392.
    Our target article proposed that language production and comprehension are interwoven, with speakers making predictions of their own utterances and comprehenders making predictions of other people's utterances at different linguistic levels. Here, we respond to comments about such issues as cognitive architecture and its neural basis, learning and development, monitoring, the nature of forward models, communicative intentions, and dialogue.
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  • Predictive uncertainty in auditory sequence processing.Niels Chr Hansen & Marcus T. Pearce - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5:88945.
    Previous studies of auditory expectation have focused on the expectedness perceived by listeners retrospectively in response to events. In contrast, this research examines predictive uncertainty —a property of listeners' prospective state of expectation prior to the onset of an event. We examine the information-theoretic concept of Shannon entropy as a model of predictive uncertainty in music cognition. This is motivated by the Statistical Learning Hypothesis, which proposes that schematic expectations reflect probabilistic relationships between sensory events learned implicitly through exposure. Using (...)
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  • What a Rational Parser Would Do.John T. Hale - 2011 - Cognitive Science 35 (3):399-443.
    This article examines cognitive process models of human sentence comprehension based on the idea of informed search. These models are rational in the sense that they strive to find a good syntactic analysis quickly. Informed search derives a new account of garden pathing that handles traditional counterexamples. It supports a symbolic explanation for local coherence as well as an algorithmic account of entropy reduction. The models are expressed in a broad framework for theories of human sentence comprehension.
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  • Modeling Structure‐Building in the Brain With CCG Parsing and Large Language Models.Miloš Stanojević, Jonathan R. Brennan, Donald Dunagan, Mark Steedman & John T. Hale - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (7):e13312.
    To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments, researchers have turned to broad‐coverage tools from natural‐language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly modeled, prior work has relied predominantly on context‐free grammars (CFGs), yet such formalisms are not sufficiently expressive for human languages. Combinatory categorial grammars (CCGs) are sufficiently expressive directly compositional models of grammar with flexible constituency that affords incremental interpretation. In this work, we evaluate whether a more expressive CCG provides a better (...)
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  • The Effect of Distance on Sentence Processing by Older Adults.Xinmiao Liu & Wenbin Wang - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
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  • Developing incrementality in filler-gap dependency processing.Emily Atkinson, Matthew W. Wagers, Jeffrey Lidz, Colin Phillips & Akira Omaki - 2018 - Cognition 179:132-149.
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  • Dependency Resolution Difficulty Increases with Distance in Persian Separable Complex Predicates: Evidence for Expectation and Memory-Based Accounts.Molood S. Safavi, Samar Husain & Shravan Vasishth - 2016 - Frontiers in Psychology 7.
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  • Thematic orders and the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese.Chien-Jer Charles Lin - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
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  • Memory Versus Expectation: Processing Relative Clauses in a Flexible Word Order Language.Eszter Ronai & Ming Xiang - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (1):e13227.
    Memory limitations and probabilistic expectations are two key factors that have been posited to play a role in the incremental processing of natural language. Relative clauses (RCs) have long served as a key proving ground for such theories of language processing. Across three self-paced reading experiments, we test the online comprehension of Hungarian subject- and object-extracted RCs (SRCs and ORCs, respectively). We capitalize on the syntactic properties of Hungarian that allow for a variety of word orders within RCs, which helps (...)
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  • Linking production and comprehension processes: The case of relative clauses.Silvia P. Gennari & Maryellen C. MacDonald - 2009 - Cognition 111 (1):1-23.
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  • Expectation-based syntactic comprehension.Roger Levy - 2008 - Cognition 106 (3):1126-1177.
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  • Uncertainty Reduction as a Measure of Cognitive Load in Sentence Comprehension.Stefan L. Frank - 2013 - Topics in Cognitive Science 5 (3):475-494.
    The entropy-reduction hypothesis claims that the cognitive processing difficulty on a word in sentence context is determined by the word's effect on the uncertainty about the sentence. Here, this hypothesis is tested more thoroughly than has been done before, using a recurrent neural network for estimating entropy and self-paced reading for obtaining measures of cognitive processing load. Results show a positive relation between reading time on a word and the reduction in entropy due to processing that word, supporting the entropy-reduction (...)
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  • Estimating the True Cost of Garden Pathing: A Computational Model of Latent Cognitive Processes.Dario Paape & Shravan Vasishth - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (8):e13186.
    Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 8, August 2022.
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  • Single‐Stage Prediction Models Do Not Explain the Magnitude of Syntactic Disambiguation Difficulty.Marten van Schijndel & Tal Linzen - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (6):e12988.
    The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden‐path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require time‐consuming reanalysis to reconstruct a discarded parse. A more recent proposal argues that the garden‐path effect can be reduced to surprisal arising in a fully parallel parser: words consistent (...)
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  • Lexical Predictability During Natural Reading: Effects of Surprisal and Entropy Reduction.Matthew W. Lowder, Wonil Choi, Fernanda Ferreira & John M. Henderson - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (S4):1166-1183.
    What are the effects of word-by-word predictability on sentence processing times during the natural reading of a text? Although information complexity metrics such as surprisal and entropy reduction have been useful in addressing this question, these metrics tend to be estimated using computational language models, which require some degree of commitment to a particular theory of language processing. Taking a different approach, this study implemented a large-scale cumulative cloze task to collect word-by-word predictability data for 40 passages and compute surprisal (...)
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  • Geometric Representations for Minimalist Grammars.Peter Beim Graben & Sabrina Gerth - 2012 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 21 (4):393-432.
    We reformulate minimalist grammars as partial functions on term algebras for strings and trees. Using filler/role bindings and tensor product representations, we construct homomorphisms for these data structures into geometric vector spaces. We prove that the structure-building functions as well as simple processors for minimalist languages can be realized by piecewise linear operators in representation space. We also propose harmony, i.e. the distance of an intermediate processing step from the final well-formed state in representation space, as a measure of processing (...)
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  • Quantifying Structural and Non‐structural Expectations in Relative Clause Processing.Zhong Chen & John T. Hale - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (1):e12927.
    Information‐theoretic complexity metrics, such as Surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003), are linking hypotheses that bridge theorized expectations about sentences and observed processing difficulty in comprehension. These expectations can be viewed as syntactic derivations constrained by a grammar. However, this expectation‐based view is not limited to syntactic information alone. The present study combines structural and non‐structural information in unified models of word‐by‐word sentence processing difficulty. Using probabilistic minimalist grammars (Stabler, 1997), we extend expectation‐based models to include (...)
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  • Vocabulary, Grammar, Sex, and Aging.Moscoso del Prado Martín Fermín - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (4):950-975.
    Understanding the changes in our language abilities along the lifespan is a crucial step for understanding the aging process both in normal and in abnormal circumstances. Besides controlled experimental tasks, it is equally crucial to investigate language in unconstrained conversation. I present an information-theoretical analysis of a corpus of dyadic conversations investigating how the richness of the vocabulary, the word-internal structure, and the syntax of the utterances evolves as a function of the speaker's age and sex. Although vocabulary diversity increases (...)
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  • Uncertainty and Expectation in Sentence Processing: Evidence From Subcategorization Distributions.Tal Linzen & T. Florian Jaeger - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (6):1382-1411.
    There is now considerable evidence that human sentence processing is expectation based: As people read a sentence, they use their statistical experience with their language to generate predictions about upcoming syntactic structure. This study examines how sentence processing is affected by readers' uncertainty about those expectations. In a self-paced reading study, we use lexical subcategorization distributions to factorially manipulate both the strength of expectations and the uncertainty about them. We compare two types of uncertainty: uncertainty about the verb's complement, reflecting (...)
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  • Rational Redundancy in Referring Expressions: Evidence from Event‐related Potentials.Elli N. Tourtouri, Francesca Delogu & Matthew W. Crocker - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (12):e13071.
    In referential communication, Grice's Maxim of Quantity is thought to imply that utterances conveying unnecessary information should incur comprehension difficulties. There is, however, considerable evidence that speakers frequently encode redundant information in their referring expressions, raising the question as to whether such overspecifications hinder listeners’ processing. Evidence from previous work is inconclusive, and mostly comes from offline studies. In this article, we present two event‐related potential (ERP) experiments, investigating the real‐time comprehension of referring expressions that contain redundant adjectives in complex (...)
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  • Rare Constructions Are More Often Sentence‐Initial.David Temperley - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (2):e12714.
    Main clause phenomena (MCPs) are syntactic constructions that occur predominantly or exclusively in main clauses. I propose a processing explanation for MCPs. Sentence processing is easiest at the beginning of the sentence (requiring less search); this follows naturally from widely held assumptions about sentence processing. Because of this, a wider variety of constructions can be allowed at the beginning of the sentence without overwhelming the sentence‐processing mechanism. Unlike pragmatic and grammatical accounts of MCPs, the processing account predicts avoidance of MCPs (...)
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  • Effects of Early Cues on the Processing of Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for Experience‐Based Theories.Fuyun Wu, Elsi Kaiser & Shravan Vasishth - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (S4):1101-1133.
    We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience-based account of Levy () and the Dependency Locality Theory. Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence-initial position, we manipulated the presence/absence of classifiers and the presence/absence of BEI, such that BEI sentences were passivized subject-extracted RCs, and no-BEI sentences were standard object-extracted RCs. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments, using (...)
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  • The processing of extraposed structures in English.Roger Levy, Evelina Fedorenko, Mara Breen & Edward Gibson - 2012 - Cognition 122 (1):12-36.
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  • On look-ahead in language: navigating a multitude of familiar paths.Shimon Edelman - unknown
    Language is a rewarding field if you are in the prediction business. A reader who is fluent in English and who knows how academic papers are typically structured will readily come up with several possible guesses as to where the title of this section could have gone, had it not been cut short by the ellipsis. Indeed, in the more natural setting of spoken language, anticipatory processing is a must: performance of machine systems for speech interpretation depends critically on the (...)
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  • A Model of Language Processing as Hierarchic Sequential Prediction.Marten van Schijndel, Andy Exley & William Schuler - 2013 - Topics in Cognitive Science 5 (3):522-540.
    Computational models of memory are often expressed as hierarchic sequence models, but the hierarchies in these models are typically fairly shallow, reflecting the tendency for memories of superordinate sequence states to become increasingly conflated. This article describes a broad-coverage probabilistic sentence processing model that uses a variant of a left-corner parsing strategy to flatten sentence processing operations in parsing into a similarly shallow hierarchy of learned sequences. The main result of this article is that a broad-coverage model with constraints on (...)
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  • Proportional Hazards Modeling of Saccadic Response Times During Reading.Mattias Nilsson & Joakim Nivre - 2013 - Topics in Cognitive Science 5 (3):541-563.
    In this article we use proportional hazards models to examine how low-level processes affect the probability of making a saccade over time, through the period of fixation, during reading. We apply the Cox proportional hazards model to investigate how launch distance (relative to word beginning), fixation location (relative to word center), and word frequency affect the hazard of a saccadic response. This model requires that covariates have a constant impact on the hazard over time, the assumption of proportional hazards. We (...)
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  • Children’s Production of Unfamiliar Word Sequences Is Predicted by Positional Variability and Latent Classes in a Large Sample of Child-Directed Speech.Danielle Matthews & Colin Bannard - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (3):465-488.
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  • Information‐Theoretic Properties of Auditory Sequences Dynamically Influence Expectation and Memory.Kat Agres, Samer Abdallah & Marcus Pearce - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (1):43-76.
    A basic function of cognition is to detect regularities in sensory input to facilitate the prediction and recognition of future events. It has been proposed that these implicit expectations arise from an internal predictive coding model, based on knowledge acquired through processes such as statistical learning, but it is unclear how different types of statistical information affect listeners’ memory for auditory stimuli. We used a combination of behavioral and computational methods to investigate memory for non-linguistic auditory sequences. Participants repeatedly heard (...)
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