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To examine the neural correlates of spoken idiom comprehension, we conducted an event-related functional MRI study with a 'rapid sentence decision' task. The spoken sentences were equally familiar but varied in degrees of 'idiom figurativeness'. Our results show that 'figurativeness' co-varied with neural activity in the left ventral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which involved two different clusters: one cluster engaged Broca's area (Brodmann area, BA: 44 & 45) and adjacent regions (BA 11 & 47); the other cluster involved the superior and medial frontal gryrus (BA 8 & 9). Moreover, the comparison between unambiguous, explicit idiomatic and literal sentences revealed left-sided cluster activity in Broca's area and BA 46 & 47. The contrast between ambiguous idiomatic and literal sentences engaged the superior and medial of the frontal midline (BA 9 & 10), but with left-sided prevalence. Finally, we report a very consistent deactivation in the superior parietal cortex by explicit idiomatic sentences as compared to literal sentences. Our findings are discussed in context of a neurological model of spoken language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphological parsing has often been studied with words in isolation. In this study we used sentence context to investigate how structural analyses of morphologically complex words are affected by the semantic content of their carrier sentences. Our main stimuli were trimorphemic ambiguous words such as unlockable (meaning either "not able to be locked" or "able to be unlocked"). We treat these words as structurally ambiguous such that the meaning of the words is determined by the perceived organisation of their constituent morphemes. The effect and malleability of this structural organisation were examined in one offline rating experiment and one cross-modal priming experiment with ambiguous words embedded in sentence context. The results of the study suggest that morphologically ambiguous words do show two interpretations and that the balance of these interpretations can be affected by the semantics of the sentence in which they are embedded. We interpret the pattern of data to suggest that when structurally ambiguous words are presented in isolation, word-internal factors determine which interpretation is to be preferred. However, in strongly constraining sentence contexts, these preferred parses are modified online to be consistent with the semantics of the entire sentence structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the data presented by Meng and Bader (2000) and interpreted as evidence in favour of serial parsing by these authors are also naturally accounted for in a weakly interactive constraint-based parsing architecture. In this way, Meng and Bader"s "Mismatch Effect", i.e., the observation that there appears to be a correlation between garden path strength and ungrammaticality detection, is reinterpreted as an epiphenomenon of constraint interaction and, thereby, as orthogonal to the serial vs. parallel parsing debate. New experimental evidence in favour of this alternative account is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioural measures (reaction times and errors) were used to study the potential effects of individual differences in verbal working memory capacity (low vs. high reading span) and a concurrent verbal working memory load (low vs. high load) on the processing of sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity in German. The sentences were disambiguated at the clause-final auxiliary to either a subject relative (SR) clause or to an object relative (OR) clause. The processing difficulty for the OR as compared to the SR clauses was reflected in worse off-line comprehension performance, particularly for low span readers. Moreover, ERPs time-locked to the disambiguating auxiliary showed an early posterior positivity between 200–350 ms for OR clauses as compared to SR clauses for high span readers. Low span readers, in contrast, showed a late frontal positivity between 500 and 800 ms. While the early positivity for high span readers was independent of the concurrent load, the late positivity varied as a function of concurrent load, being delayed in the high load condition. These results indicate that syntactic processes in language comprehension are related to individual differences in parsing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can have an influence on parsing, and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. We measured naming latencies for transitive and complement clause continuations of sentences which contained verbs which subcategorise for these two structures. Naming latency was taken to be an on-line indication of parsing difficulty. Faster latencies were found when the sentence continuation accorded with a verb's preferred subcategory structure, than when it accorded with its non-preferred structure. This suggests that verb subcategory preferences do influence the parse. The stronger the preference of the verb for one subcategory structure over the other, the larger the advantage in naming latency found for the preferred over the non-preferred continuation. This suggests that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. The findings support the predictions of constraint-satisfaction models of parsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question addressed in this study is how lexical information stored with verbs is used during the earliest stages of syntactic analysis. The properties of a novel type of verb we term ''reciprocal verbs" were exam ined in three experiments. Reciprocal verbs include hug and kiss - verbs that alternate between a transitive (e.g.Bill hugged Mary ) and an intransitive form (Bill and Mary hugged), but whose intransitive form requires a conjoined subject. In three experiments, readers were presented with garden-path sentences containing reciprocal verbs, and their eye movements were m onitored. The experiments demonstrate that information from the reciprocal verb influenced the earliest stages of syntactic parsing. Implications for models of parsing are discussed, focusing in particular on the argument structure of reciprocal verbs as well as the role of argument-structure frequency in parsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of sentence processing can be classified by the role that lexical heads play in first-pass parsing. In some theories, syntactic structure cannot even be built before it is licensed by a head (Abney, 1989; Prichett, 1992), whereas in other models, at the opposite extreme, only major category information in lexical items is used during the rule-based initial structure building process (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990; M itchell, 1987). In this paper, we will introduce a fully increm ental model that accounts for attachment preferences by the linear order of lexical heads in the surface structure and their thematic properties. The principle of "parameterised head attachment" and a serial variant, the SOUL mechanism, will be discussed on the basis of three on-line experim ents on NP- and PP-attachment in German verb-second and verb-final sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent work on sentence processing, lexical frequencies have been proposed as a primary mechanism for syntactic and lexical disam biguation. In this paper, we instead focus on the consequences that the structural configuration of lexical knowledge has for the timecourse of parsing. We concentrate on reduced relative clauses and propose a new lexical-structural analysis for those verbs that are difficult in this construction, manner of motion verbs. The interaction between the proposed lexical structure and the com petitive attachment parser (Stevenson, 1994b) explains the persistent difficulty of this construction with a manner of motion verb, even in disambiguating contexts (e.g. a reduced relative in object position) or with non-am biguous past participle verb forms. W eighted influences on the activation competition are possible with other verbs, and the model can therefore also explain data that dem onstrate contextual effects on reduced relatives with sim ple transitives. Consequences for the frequency-based models, and all models which base the explanation of the difficulty on the ambiguity of the past participle form , are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deriving representations of meaning has been a long-standing problem in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. The lack of a m odel for representing semantic and grammatical knowledge has been a handicap in attempting to model the effects of semantic constraints in hum an syntactic processing. A computational model of high-dim ensional context space, the Hyperspace A nalogue to Language (H AL), is presented with a series of simulations modelling a variety of human empirical results. HAL learns its representations from the unsupervised processing of 300 million words of conversational text. W e propose that HAL's high-dim ensional context space can be used to (1) provide a basic categorisation of semantic and grammatical concepts, (2) model certain aspects of morphological ambiguity in verbs, and (3) provide an account of semantic context effects in syntactic processing. W e propose that the distributed and contextually derived representations that HAL acquires provide a basis for the subconceptual knowledge that can be used in accounting for a diverse set of cognitive phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dynamical systems approach to parsing is proposed in which syntactic hypotheses are associated with attractors in a metric space. These attractors have many of the properties of traditional syntactic categories, while at the same time encoding context-dependent, lexically specific distinctions. Hypotheses motivated by the dynam ical system theory were tested in four reading time experiments examining the interaction of simple lexical frequencies, frequencies that are contingent on an environment defined by syntactic categories, and frequencies contingent on verb argument structure. The experiments documented a variety of contingent frequency effects that cut across traditional linguistic grains, each of which was predicted by the dynamical systems model. These effects were simulated in an implementation of the theory, em ploying a recurrent network trained from a corpus to construct metric representations and an algorithm implementing a gravitational dynamical system to model reading time as time to gravitate to an attractor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a new addition to the family of parsing models based on the principles of Description Theory (Marcus, Hindle, & Fleck, 1983). We demonstrate how the definition of two simple parsing operations, simple attachment and tree lowering , which are related to the grammatical composition operations of substitution and adjunction in the Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism, yields a parser which is more constrained than previous Description Theory based models (e.g. Gorrell, 1995a). Since the tree-lowering operation allows the parser to reanalyse in the case of''unconscious" garden paths, it can be used to investigate the consequences of adopting various search strategies for reanalysis, predicting preferences in cases wheremorethan one possibility for reanalysis exists. Considering data from English and Japanese, we show that reanalysis preferences may differ between head-final and head-initial languages, and suggest some reasons why this might be so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosody has been demonstrated to play some role in parsing the grammatical structure of utterances of texts that might otherwise display surface (syntactic) ambiguity. In the context of this research, it is important to be able to state with reasonable certainty what the prosody of an utterance is. This paper considers the fact that the prosody is itself a grammatical (phonological) structure that mustbeparsed. First,prosodiccategories that determineor are marked by the intonational pattern are described for English and Japanese, concentrating on the categories ''pitch accent" and tonally marked ''phrases" at levels of the prosodic hierarchy above the (prosodic) word. Then various potential ambiguities in parsing these categories are discussed, with attention to both the phonological and the phonetic contexts which are most conducive to ambiguity between alternative prosodic parses, and to the implications of these ambiguities for claims about the relationship between prosody and syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representing input utterances in structurally appropriate fashion is doubly important for naive language learners: Learners need to parse utterances both to generate immediate suitable interpretations and to provide bases for inducing syntactic patterns or setting grammatical parameters so that future utterances can be appropriately represented and interpreted. Many of the powerful tools used for parsing by mature speakers, however, are unavailable to infants at the outset of language learning. Possessing only meagre lexicons and rudimentary grammars, infants must begin to carve words from continuous speech, assign words to appropriate grammatical categories, and determine how words group into phrases through largely bottom-up analyses of input. Research presented in this paper on the character of infant-directed speechand the nature of infant speech perception abilities from 6 to 12 months strongly suggests that prosody, in conjunction with other forms of phonological information available in input speech, is an important contributor tosuchearlyanalysesand, hence, assists infants in developing root processes of parsing. Some consequences for syntax acquisition are discussed: Input representations enhanced with prosodically encoded information offer multiple solutions to problems of triggering parameter settings that are not tractable given simple string-like representations of input utterances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction surveys some recent studies of the relationship between prosody and syntax, and provides a context for the papers contained in this issue ofLanguage and Cognitive Processes. It charts the development of research from the study of the mapping between syntax and phonetics to on-line investigations of the use of prosodic information in the parsing of utterances. It highlights the importance of recognising the phonological organisation of prosody as a grammatical system, and discusses issues concerning the prosodic marking of focus, the existence of a hierarchical prosodic structure, and prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]