Anticipation plays a role in language comprehension. In this article, we explore the extent to which verb sense influences expectations about upcoming structure. We focus on change of state verbs like shatter, which have different senses that are expressed in either transitive or intransitive structures, depending on the sense that is used. In two experiments we influence the interpretation of verb sense by manipulating the thematic fit of the grammatical subject as cause or affected entity for the verb, and test (...) whether readers’ expectations for a transitive or intransitive structure change as a result. This sense‐biasing context influenced reading times in the postverbal regions. Reading times for transitive sentences were faster following good‐cause than good‐theme subjects, but the opposite pattern was found for intransitive sentences. We conclude that readers use sense‐contingent subcategorization preferences during on‐line comprehension. (shrink)

A model is presented that addresses both the distribution and comprehension of different forms of referring expressions in language. This model is expressed in a formalism (Kamp & Reyle, 1993) that uses interpretive rules to map syntactic representations onto representations of discourse. Basic interpretive rules are developed for names, pronouns, definite descriptions, and quantified descriptions. These rules are triggered by syntactic input and interact dynamically with representations of discourse to establish reference and coreference. This interaction determines the ease with which (...) coreference can be established for different linguistic forms given the existing discourse context. The performance of the model approximates that observed in studies of intuitive judgments of grammaticality and studies using online measures of language comprehension. The model uses the same basic interpretive mechanisms for coreference within and between sentences, thereby linking the domain traditionally studied by generative linguists to domains that have been of concern primarily to psychologists and computational linguists. (shrink)

Responds to comments by G. Kempen (see record 1996-00289-001) regarding L. Frazier's (see record 1995-31821-001) comments regarding G. Kempen's (see record 1995-31826-001) comments on Frazier et al's (see record 1994-32229-001) article on processing discontinuous words. There are serious problems with Kempen's account of the data of Frazier et al. These problems involve the principle of uncertainty invoked by Kempen. It is unclear that all control items in the original Frazier et al study were open to a complex verb analysis. Kempen's (...) alternative account of the results is not only incomplete, but it is inconsistent with the English data and with half of the Dutch data, in addition to relying on a principle of parsing that is otherwise unmotivated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2000 APA, all rights reserved) (unassigned). (shrink)

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.

The idea that correspondences relating grammatical relations and semantics (argument structure constructions) are needed to account for simple sentence types is reviewed, clarified, updated and compared with two lexicalist alternatives. Traditional lexical rules take one verb as ‘input’ and create (or relate) a different verb as ‘output’. More recently, invisible derivational verb templates have been proposed, which treat argument structure patterns as zero derivational affixes that combine with a root verb to yield a new verb. While the derivational template perspective (...) can address several problems that arise for traditional lexical rules, it still faces problems in accounting for idioms, which often contain specifications that are not appropriately assigned to individual verbs or derivational affixes (regarding adjuncts, modification, and inflection). At the same time, it is clear that verbs play a central role in determining their distribution. The balance between verbs and phrasal argument structure constructions is addressed via the Principles of Semantic Coherence and Correspondence together with a usage-based hierarchy of constructions that contains entries which can include particular verbs and other lexical material. (shrink)

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the (...) natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the “logical” problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make inferences about the initial interpretation using pragmatic information, suggesting the possibility that the initial analysis persisted due to comprehenders' pragmatic inference but not to their failure to perform complete reanalysis of the initial misanalysis. Our study investigated this (...) by testing locally ambiguous relative clause sentences in Japanese, in which the initial misinterpretation contradicts the correct interpretation. Our study using a self-paced reading technique demonstrated evidence for the persistence of the initial analysis with this structure. The results from an eye-tracking study further suggested that the phenomenon directly reflected the amount of support given to the initial incorrect analysis prior to disambiguating information: The more supported the incorrect main clause analysis was, the more likely comprehenders were to preserve the analysis even after the analysis was falsified. Our results thus demonstrated that the preservation of the initial analysis occurs not due to referential ambiguities but to comprehenders' difficulty to fully revise the highly supported initial interpretation. (shrink)

This study provides evidence for implicit learning in syntactic comprehension. By reanalyzing data from a syntactic priming experiment (Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008), we find that the error signal associated with a syntactic prime influences comprehenders' subsequent syntactic expectations. This follows directly from error‐based implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming, but it is unexpected under accounts that consider syntactic priming a consequence of temporary increases in base‐level activation. More generally, the results raise questions about the principles underlying the maintenance of implicit (...) statistical knowledge relevant to language processing, and about possible functional motivations for syntactic priming. (shrink)

This paper provides a computational characterization of coherence that applies to a wide range of philosophical problems and psychological phenomena. Maximizing coherence is a matter of maximizing satisfaction of a set of positive and negative constraints. After comparing five algorithms for maximizing coherence, we show how our characterization of coherence overcomes traditional philosophical objections about circularity and truth.

The present study aims to delineate the working mechanism of prediction in sentence comprehension, by disentangling the influence of the facilitated general memory retrieval from the coexistent influence of the predicted language-specific semantic and/or syntactic information for the first time. The results support that prediction might influence the downstream cognitive processing in two aspects: the pre-activated information facilitates the retrieval of a matched input in memory and, the pre-activated information interacts with higher-level semantic/syntactic processing. More importantly, the present findings suggest (...) that these two types of influences seem to occur at different stages of sentence comprehension: the facilitated memory retrieval of the input modulates N400 amplitude and the latency of post-N400 late central-parietal positivity/P600, while the predicted semantic/syntactic information and/or their interactions modulate the amplitude of the late positivity. The present findings would be helpful for interpreting the underlying mechanism of observed effects in prediction studies. (shrink)

Formal theories of mental representation have receded from the importance they had in the early days of cognitive science. I argue that such theories are crucial in any mental domain, not just for their own sake, but to guide experimental inquiry, as well as to integrate the domain into the mind as a whole. To illustrate the criteria of adequacy for theories of mental representation, I compare two theoretical approaches to language: classical generative grammar (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1995) and the (...) parallel architecture (Jackendoff, 1997, 2002). The grounds for comparison include (a) the internal coherence of the theory across phonology, syntax, and semantics; (b) the relation of language to other mental faculties; (c) the relationship between grammar and lexicon; (d) relevance to theories of language processing; and (e) the possibility of languages with little or no syntax. (shrink)

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

The ability to combine words into novel sentences has been used to argue that humans have symbolic language production abilities. Critiques of connectionist models of language often center on the inability of these models to generalize symbolically (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 1998). To address these issues, a connectionist model of sentence production was developed. The model had variables (role‐concept bindings) that were inspired by spatial representations (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). In order to take advantage of these variables, a novel (...) dual‐pathway architecture with event semantics is proposed and shown to be better at symbolic generalization than several variants. This architecture has one pathway for mapping message content to words and a separate pathway that enforces sequencing constraints. Analysis of the model's hidden units demonstrated that the model learned different types of information in each pathway, and that the model's compositional behavior arose from the combination of these two pathways. The model's ability to balance symbolic and statistical behavior in syntax acquisition and to model aphasic double dissociations provided independent support for the dual‐pathway architecture. (shrink)

This study addressed the question of whether L2 learners are able to utilize verb’s argument structure information in online structural analysis. Previous L2 research has shown that L2 learners have difficulty in using verb’s intransitive information to guide online syntactic processing. This is true even though L2 learners have grammatical knowledge that is correct and similar to that of native speakers. In the present study, we contrasted three hypotheses, the initial inaccessibility account, the intransitivity overriding account, and the fuzzy subcategorization (...) frame account, to investigate whether L2 learner’s knowledge of intransitive verbs is in fact ignored in L2 online structural analysis. The initial inaccessibility account and the fuzzy subcategorization frame account predicted that L2 learners cannot access intransitivity information in building syntactic structures in any situation. The intransitivity overriding account predicted that intransitivity information is accessed in L2 parsing, but this process is overridden by the strong transitivity preference when a verb is followed by a noun phrase. Importantly, the intransitivity overriding account specifically predicted that L2 learners would be able to use intransitive information in online syntactic processing when a noun phrase does not appear immediately following a verb. We tested the three accounts in an eye-tracking reading experiment using filler-gap dependency structures. We manipulated verb’s transitivity information and lexically based plausibility information and tested English native speakers as a control L1 group and Japanese-English L2 participants. The results showed that L2 learners as well as native speakers processed sentences differently depending on the subcategorization information of the verb, and adopted transitive analysis only when the verb was optionally transitive, providing support for the intransitivity overriding. The results further demonstrated that L2 learners had strong expectations for the transitive structure, which is consistent with the view proposed by the hyper-active gap-filling hypothesis. In addition, the results showed that the semantic mismatch in the incorrect transitive analysis facilitated native speaker’s processing but caused difficulty for L2 learners. Together, the current study provides evidence that L2 learners use intransitive information of the verbs to guide their structural analysis when there are no overriding constraints. (shrink)

We present interpretation‐based processing—a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the prior discourse. Our theory offers a unified account of the processing of literal sentences, metaphoric sentences, and sentences containing semantic illusions. It also explains how text can prime lexical access. We (...) show that word literality is a matter of degree and that the speed and quality of comprehension depend both on how similar words are to their antecedents in the preceding text and how salient the sentence is with respect to the preceding text. Interpretation‐based processing also reconciles superficially contradictory findings about the difference in processing times for metaphors and literals. The theory has been implemented in ACT‐R [Anderson and Lebiere, The Atomic Components of Thought, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, NJ, 1998]. (shrink)