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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]

Abstract: Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the interplay of structure building and the integration of morphosyntactic information during incremental parsing. The critical sentence conditions examined the processing of verbs that were ambiguous between a clause-initial finite main verb analysis and an analysis as an (homophonous) infinitival verb in a fronted verb phrase. The task interacts with particle stripping, since particles are stranded if the finite verb is fronted. Conversely, if the particle is present, the potentially finite verb cannot be the fronted finite verb. This is a top-down (grammar-driven) prediction of the parser with immediate impact on the ongoing structure building process of the parser. The ERP results provide first of all straightforward indications for a minimality-driven parsing process (motto: assign immediately the minimal convergent structure to the available input string, and disregard ambiguities that would result in more complex assignments). Second, they show that the parser cross-checks (validates) the minimality-driven outcome for its compatibility with the locally available morpho-syntactic information (finiteness, agreement, particle stripping). Furthermore, we suggest a simple metric which resolves apparent contradictions with respect to previous ERP findings for reanalysis in structural ambiguities and which solely depends on the complexity of structural reanalyzes (that is, whether the required structural modification proceeds within a single clause, or takes place across a sentence boundary). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the present paper a constraint-based description of German word prosody is suggested in which the constraint ranking is in crucial parts supported empirically by experimental findings from a pseudoword production task and from studies using electrophysiological measurements. It is shown how stress patterns of existing German words as well as experimental results on diverse prosodic structures can be expressed by minimal violations of prosodic constraints. In this way, our analysis aims to gain more insights into the question, which metrical structures are least marked in German. Furthermore, an aspect of minimality in metrical systems is considered, which regards the structure of metrical feet in German. Can we establish strict binarity of feet or do we find evidence for ternary structures? [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this study, the authors aim to clarify whether the subject–object asymmetry in relative clause comprehension is due to the use of parsing strategies (Active Filler Theory) or to a greater memory load generated by object sentences. Two experiments investigate how individual differences in working memory span may influence the reading times of relative sentences in Italian, a language characterized by a flexible structure. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that object extraction is more complex than subject extraction when sentences have a canonical structure. Furthermore, low-span participants have particular difficulties with object relative sentence comprehension. The results of Experiment 2 show that subject-relative clauses with uncanonical structures are more complex to understand than object-relative clauses, and low-span participants have more difficulties than high-span participants in elaborating both subject and object relative clauses. These data seem to be coherent with the Active Filler Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study combined artificial language learning (ALL) with conventional experimental techniques to test whether statistical speech segmentation outputs are integrated into adult listeners’ mental lexicon. Lexicalization was assessed through inhibitory effects of novel neighbors (created by the parsing process) on auditory lexical decisions to real words. Both immediately after familiarization and post-one week, ALL outputs were lexicalized only when the cues available during familiarization (transitional probabilities and wordlikeness) suggested the same parsing (Experiments 1 and 3). No lexicalization effect occurred with incongruent cues (Experiments 2 and 4). Yet, ALL differed from chance, suggesting a dissociation between item knowledge and lexicalization. Similarly contrasted results were found when frequency of occurrence of the stimuli was equated during familiarization (Experiments 3 and 4). Our findings thus indicate that ALL outputs may be lexicalized as far as the segmentation cues are congruent, and that this process cannot be accounted for by raw frequency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many studies have suggested that a word's orthographic form must be processed before its meaning becomes available. Some interpret the (null) finding of equal facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes in early stages of morphological processing as consistent with this view. Recent literature suggests that morphological facilitation tends to be greater after transparent than after opaque primes, however. To determine whether the degree of semantic transparency influences parsing into a stem and a suffix (morphological decomposition) in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared patterns of facilitation between semantically transparent (e.g., coolant—COOL) and opaque (e.g., rampant—RAMP) prime—target pairs. Form properties of the stem (frequency, neighborhood size, and prime—target letter overlap), as well as related—unrelated and transparent—opaque affixes, were matched. Morphological facilitation was significantly greater for semantically transparent pairs than for opaque pairs. Ratings of prime—target relatedness predicted the magnitude of facilitation. The results limit the scope of form-then-meaning models of word recognition and demonstrate that semantic similarity can influence even early stages of morphological processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research investigated how comprehenders use verb information during syntactic parsing. Two reading experiments investigated the relationship between verb-specific variables and reading time. These experiments were close replications of prior work; however, two statistical techniques were used, rather than one. These were item-by-item correlations and participant-by-participant regression. In Experiment 1, reading time was measured using a self-paced moving window. In Experiment 2, eye movements were recorded during reading. The results of both experiments showed that the results of two types of statistical analyses support contradictory conclusions. The analyses involving participant-by-participant regression analyses provided no evidence for the early use of verb information in parsing and support syntax-first approaches to parsing. In contrast, the results of item-by-item correlation were consistent with the prior research, supporting the view that verb information can guide initial parsing decisions. Implications for theories of parsing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase-structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the “best” tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing “structural analogy” between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus-based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar-based and rule-based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children’s language development from item-based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wh-dependencies are known to be formed rapidly in real-time comprehension. The parser posits the location of gap sites in advance of the bottom-up evidence for missing constituents, and must therefore have a means of deciding when and where to project dependencies. Previous studies have observed that the parser avoids building ungrammatical wh-dependencies, for example, by restricting the search for gap sites from island domains. This paper tests the stronger claim that constraints are not merely respected, but that grammatical knowledge actively prompts the construction of some representations in advance of the input. Three self-paced reading experiments examined patterns of wh-dependency formation in multiple-dependency constructions: obligatory across-the-board (ATB) extraction from coordinated verb phrases, and from optional parasitic gaps in post-verbal adjunct clauses. The key finding is that comprehenders immediately enforce the requirement for extraction from coordinates, and hence actively search for multiple gap sites within a coordinate VP; but they do not search for post-verbal parasitic gaps. This difference cannot be attributed to relative differences in acceptability, as comprehenders rated both of these multiple-gap constructions equally highly, nor can it be explained by general parsing incentives to develop maximal incremental interpretations of partial strings. More plausibly, the difference reflects the deployment of detailed grammatical knowledge in a parser that is motivated to satisfy structural licensing requirements in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is shown that the class of left-to-right regular languages coincides with the class of languages that are accepted by monotone deterministic RL-automata, in this way establishing a close correspondence between a classical parsing algorithm and a certain restricted type of analysis by reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents two on-line self-paced reading studies and three off-line acceptability judgment studies on the processing of backward anaphoric dependencies in Japanese in which a pronoun precedes potential antecedent noun phrases. The studies investigate the real-time formation of coreference relations and operator-variable binding relations to determine whether speakers of head-final languages are able to construct grammatically accurate syntactic structures before they encounter a verb. The results of the acceptability rating studies confirm previous claims that backwards anaphoric dependencies in Japanese are more acceptable in configurations where a pronoun has been fronted via scrambling from a position where it would be c-commanded by its antecedent. The results of the on-line studies demonstrate that these acceptability contrasts have an immediate impact on parsing. Reading-time results showed immediate sensitivity to the semantic congruency between an NP and a preceding pronoun in noncanonical (“scrambled”) word orders, and no immediate effect of semantic congruency otherwise. This contrast was found both for coreference relations involving the personal pronouns kare/ kanojo (experiment 1) and for operator-variable relations involving the demonstrative pronoun soko (experiment 3). These findings go beyond previous evidence for incremental parsing in head-final languages by showing that Japanese speakers build compositional structures (such as anaphoric relations) in a grammatically constrained fashion in advance of encountering a verb in the input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Charles Perfetti, University Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, is presented. He offered a brief biographical sketch of his life. He revealed that reading was not initially not on his list of interesting problems, and described how his interest in reading started. He also discussed his views on speech, writing, history test learning and parsing in relation to reading.

Abstract: In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., While the lovers kissed the baby played alone). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases (the bride and the groom), plural definite descriptions (the lovers), and numerically quantified noun phrases (the two lovers). We found no evidence for garden-path effects when the subject was conjoined [Ferreira, F., & McClure, K. K. (1997). Parsing of garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 273–306], but traditional garden-path effects were found with the other plural noun phrases. In addition, we tested plural anaphors that had a plural antecedent present in the discourse. We found that when the antecedent was conjoined, garden-path effects were absent compared to cases in which the antecedent was a plural definite description. Our results indicate that the parser is sensitive to the conceptual representation of a plural constituent. In particular, it appears that a Complex Reference Object [Moxey, L. M., Sanford, A. J., Sturt, P., & Morrow, L. I. (2004). Constrains on the formation of plural reference objects: The influence of role, conjunction, and type of description. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 346–364] automatically activates a reciprocal reading of a reciprocal verb. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We question whether Adele Goldberg fulfills her self-declared goal in “Constructions at Work”, i.e. to develop a usage-based theory that “can produce an open-ended number of novel utterances based on a finite amount of input”. We point out converging trends in computational linguistics that suggest formalizations of Construction Grammar. In particular, we go into recent developments in Data-Oriented Parsing, such as U-DOP and LFG-DOP, that produce an unlimited number of new utterances based on a finite number of stored form-meaning pairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a simple attribute graph grammar as a generative representation for man-made scenes such as buildings, hallways, kitchens, and living rooms and studies an effective top-down/bottom-up inference algorithm for parsing images in the process of maximizing a Bayesian posterior probability or equivalently minimizing a description length (MDL). This simple grammar has one class of primitives as its terminal nodes, i.e., the projection of planar rectangles in 3-space into the image plane, and six production rules for the spatial layout of the rectangular surfaces. All of the terminal and nonterminal nodes in the grammar are described by attributes for their geometric properties and image appearance. Each production rule is associated with some equations that constrain the attributes of a parent node and those of its children. Given an input image, the inference algorithm computes (or constructs) a parse graph, which includes a parse tree for the hierarchical decomposition and a number of spatial constraints. In the inference algorithm, the bottom-up step detects an excessive number of rectangles as weighted candidates, which are sorted in a certain order and activate top-down predictions of occluded or missing components through the grammar rules. The whole procedure is, in spirit, similar to the data-driven Markov chain Monte Carlo paradigm [39], [33], except that a greedy algorithm is adopted for simplicity. In the experiment, we show that the grammar and top-down inference can largely improve the performance of bottom-up detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop an approach to automatically identify the most probable multiword constructions used in children’s utterances, given syntactically annotated utterances from the Brown corpus of CHILDES. The found constructions cover many interesting linguistic phenomena from the language acquisition literature and show a progression from very concrete toward abstract constructions. We show quantitatively that for all children of the Brown corpus grammatical abstraction, defined as the relative number of variable slots in the productive units of their grammar, increases globally with age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an algorithm based on collocational data for word sense disambiguation (WSD). The aim of this algorithm is to maximize efficiency by minimizing (1) computational costs and (2) linguistic tagging/annotation. The formalization of our WSD algorithm is based on discriminant function analysis (DFA). This statistical technique allows us to parametrize each collocational item with its meaning, using just bare text. The parametrized data allow us to classify cases (sentences with an ambiguous word) into the values of a categorical dependent (each of the meanings of the ambiguous word). To evaluate the validity and efficiency of our WSD algorithm, we previously hand sense-tagged all the sentences containing ambiguous words and then cross-validated the hand sense-tagged data with the automatic WSD performance. Finally, we present the global results of our algorithm after applying it to a limited set of words in both languages: Spanish and English, highlighting the points we consider relevant for further analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The syntax of different natural languages are different, hence the parsing of different natural languages are also different, thus leadings to structures of their parsing-trees being different. The reason that the sentences in different natural languages can be translated to each other is that they have the same meaning. This paper discusses a new sentence parsing, called semantic-parsing, based on semantic units theory. It is a new theory where a sentence of a natural language is not regarded as of words and phrases arranged linearly; rather it is expected to consist of semantic units with or without type-parameters. This is a new parsing approach where the syntax-parsing-tree and semantic-parsing-tree are isomorphic. It is also a new approach in which the structure-trees of the sentences in all different natural languages can correspond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We built an NLP system implementing a 'virtual writing conference' for elementary-school children, with German as the target language. Currently, state-of-the-art computer support for writing tasks is restricted to multiple-choice questions or quizzes because automatic parsing of the often ambiguous and fragmentary texts produced by pupils presents insurmountable problems. Here, we follow a different course by deploying natural language generation technology to evaluate and improve the grammatical quality of student output. Based on an abstract representation of the story under construction, all paraphrases of simple and combined clauses are generated fully automatically. From this source, the system produces exercises enabling the pupils to improve their sentences. We apply parsing technology only in the teacher mode, where new stories are entered into the system in a simple manner. The system we describe here is a prototype including a full exercise generation mode and a rudimentary teacher mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in sentence comprehension suggests that lexically specific information plays a key role in on-line syntactic ambiguity resolution. On the basis of an analysis of the local NP/S-ambiguity, the present study offers a corpus-based approach to sentence processing that supports this view. However, it is proposed that the relevant information used to recover the syntactic structure of an incoming string of words is not retrieved from individual verbs but from a more fine-grained level of form-meaning pairings that distinguishes different verb senses. The investigation proceeds in two steps: First, verb-general and sense-specific preferences for nominal and sentential complementation are induced from corpus data and compared using odds ratios as a measure of association. Second, correlation analyses are performed that relate the computed coeffcients of association to reading time latencies from a recent self-paced moving window experiment (Hare et al. 2003). The results corroborate the view that individual verb senses, rather than individual verbs, guide initial parsing decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in functional and cognitive linguistics has argued and presented evidence that the positioning of adverbial clauses is motivated by competing pressures from syntactic parsing, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Continuing this line of research, the current paper investigates the effect of the iconicity principle on the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. The iconicity principle predicts that the linear ordering of main and subordinate clauses mirrors the sequential ordering of the events they describe. Drawing on corpus data from spoken and written English, the paper shows that, although temporal clauses exhibit a general tendency to follow the main clause, there is a clear correlation between clause order and iconicity: temporal clauses denoting a prior event precede the main clause more often than temporal clauses of posteriority. In addition to the iconicity principle, there are other factors such as length, complexity, and pragmatic import that may affect the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. Using logistic regression analysis, the paper investigates the effects of the various factors on the linear structuring of complex sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critical review of recent work on children's interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences. Our question is whether current generalizations about scope resolution in child language adequately explain all the data that they should explain. In particular, we consider a generalization that has seen many incarnations, the so-called Observation of Isomorphism. We argue that the Observation of Isomorphism has no place in our theory of child language. In particular, we highlight the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of current theories which attribute a privileged role to surface scope in children's parsing (e.g., ). Furthermore, we show that the Observation of Isomorphism cannot even be invoked to describe children's non-adult behavior, by reviewing existing experimental findings showing that children may in fact select inverse scope interpretations for sentences that adults consistently interpret on surface scope (see ). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

AbstractThis paper presents a robust parsing algorithm and semantic formalism for the interpretation of utterances in spoken negotiative dialogue with databases. The algorithm works in two passes: a domain-specific pattern-matching phase and a domain-independent semantic analysis phase. Robustness is achieved by limiting the set of representable utterance types to an empirically motivated subclass which is more expressive than propositional slot?value lists, but much less expressive than first-order logic. Our evaluation shows that in actual practice the vast majority of utterances that occur can be handled, and that the parsing algorithm is highly efficient and accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of researchers have recently conducted experiments comparing "deep" hand-crafted wide-coverage with "shallow" treebank- and machine-learning-based parsers at the level of dependencies, using simple and automatic methods to convert tree output generated by the shallow parsers into dependencies. In this article, we revisit such experiments, this time using sophisticated automatic LFG f-structure annotation methodologies with surprising results. We compare various PCFG and history-based parsers to find a baseline parsing system that fits best into our automatic dependency structure annotation technique. This combined system of syntactic parser and dependency structure annotation is compared to two hand-crafted, deep constraint-based parsers, RASP and XLE. We evaluate using dependency-based gold standards and use the Approximate Randomization Test to test the statistical significance of the results. Our experiments show that machine-learning-based shallow grammars augmented with sophisticated automatic dependency annotation technology outperform hand-crafted, deep, widecoverage constraint grammars. Currently our best system achieves an f-score of 82.73% against the PARC 700 Dependency Bank, a statistically significant improvement of 2.18% over the most recent results of 80.55% for the hand-crafted LFG grammar and XLE parsing system and an f-score of 80.23% against the CBS 500 Dependency Bank, a statistically significant 3.66% improvement over the 76.57% achieved by the hand-crafted RASP grammar and parsing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probabilistic modeling of lexicalized grammars is difficult because these grammars exploit complicated data structures, such as typed feature structures. This prevents us from applying common methods of probabilistic modeling in which a complete structure is divided into substructures under the assumption of statistical independence among sub-structures. For example, part-of-speech tagging of a sentence is decomposed into tagging of each word, and CFGparsing is split into applications of CFGrules. These methods have relied on the structure of the target problem, namely lattices or trees, and cannot be applied to graph structures including typed feature structures. This article proposes the feature forest model as a solution to the problem of probabilistic modeling of complex data structures including typed feature structures. The feature forest model provides a method for probabilistic modeling without the independence assumption when probabilistic events are represented with feature forests. Feature forests are generic data structures that represent ambiguous trees in a packed forest structure. Feature forest models are maximum entropy models defined over feature forests. A dynamic programming algorithm is proposed for maximum entropy estimation without unpacking feature forests. Thus probabilistic modeling of any data structures is possible when they are represented by feature forests. This article also describes methods for representing HPSGsyntactic structures and predicate-argument structures with feature forests. Hence, we describe a complete strategy for developing probabilistic models for HPSGparsing. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is empirically evaluated through parsing experiments on the Penn Treebank, and the promise of applicability to parsing of real-world sentences is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: le, la, les, un, une, and des. The six articles were compared with pseudoarticles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic nouns, using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. The pseudo articles were similar to real articles in terms of phonetic composition and phonotactic probability, and real and pseudo noun phrases were alike in terms of overall prosodic contour. In three experiments, 11-month-old infants showed preference for real over pseudo articles, suggesting they have the articles' word-forms stored in long-term memory. The second part of the study evaluates several hypotheses about the role of articles in 11-month-olds infants' word recognition. Evidence from three experiments supports the view that articles help infants to recognize the following words. We propose that 11-month-olds have the capacity to parse noun phrases into their constituents, which is consistent with the more general view that function words define a syntactic skeleton that serves as a basis for parsing spoken utterances. This proposition is compared to a competing account, which argues that 11-month-olds recognize noun-phrases as whole-words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Prior studies of ambiguity resolution in young children have found that children rely heavily on lexical information but persistently fail to use referential constraints in online parsing [Trueswell, J.C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N.M., & Logrip, M.L, (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89–134; Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology, 49(3), 238–299]. This pattern is consistent with either a modular parsing system driven by stored lexical information or an interactive system which has yet to acquire low-validity referential constraints. In two experiments we explored whether children could use a third constraint—prosody—to resolve globally ambiguous prepositional-phrase attachments (“You can feel the frog with the feather”). Four to six-year-olds and adults were tested using the visual world paradigm. In both groups the fixation patterns were influenced by lexical cues by around 200ms after the onset of the critical PP-object noun (“feather”). In adults the prosody manipulation had an effect in this early time window. In children the effect of prosody was delayed by approximately 500ms. The effects of lexical and prosodic cues were roughly additive: prosody influenced the interpretation of utterances with strong lexical cues and lexical information had an effect on utterances with strong prosodic cues. We conclude that young children, like adults, can rapidly use both of these information sources to resolve structural ambiguities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We introduce LTAG-spinal, a novel variant of traditional Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with desirable linguistic, computational and statistical properties. Unlike in traditional LTAG, subcategorization frames and the argument–adjunct distinction are left underspecified in LTAG-spinal. LTAG-spinal with adjunction constraints is weakly equivalent to LTAG. The LTAG-spinal formalism is used to extract an LTAG-spinal Treebank from the Penn Treebank with Propbank annotation. Based on Propbank annotation, predicate coordination and LTAG adjunction structures are successfully extracted. The LTAG-spinal Treebank makes explicit semantic relations that are implicit or absent from the original PTB. LTAG-spinal provides a very desirable resource for statistical LTAG parsing, incremental parsing, dependency parsing, and semantic parsing. This treebank has been successfully used to train an incremental LTAG-spinal parser and a bidirectional LTAG dependency parser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactically ambiguous sentences are sometimes read faster than disambiguated strings. Models of parsing have explained this tendency by appealing either to a race in the construction of alternative structures or to reanalysis. However, it is also possible that readers of ambiguous sentences save time by strategically underspecifying interpretations of ambiguous attachments. In a self-paced reading study, participants viewed sentences with relative clauses that could attach to one of two sites. Type of question was also manipulated between participants in order to test whether goals can influence reading/parsing strategies. The experiment revealed an ambiguity advantage in reading times, but only when participants expected superficial comprehension questions. When participants expected queries about relative clause interpretation, disambiguating regions were inspected with more care, and the ambiguity advantage was attenuated. However, even when participants expected relative clause queries, question-answering times suggested underspecified representations of ambiguous relative clause attachments. The results support the construal and "good-enough" models of parsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we examine the word recognition process for low-frequency morphologically complex words. One goal of the study was to replicate and expand upon findings suggesting facilitative effects of morphological relatives of a target word. A second goal was to demonstrate the need for a reinterpretation of root and surface frequency effects, which traditionally have been taken as indicators of parsing-based and memory-driven processing, respectively. In a first study, we used the same stimuli across auditory and visual lexical decision and naming. Mixed-effects statistical modeling revealed that surface frequency was a robust predictor of RTs even in the very low end of the distribution, but root frequency was not. Also, the nature of the similarity between a target and its lexical competitors is crucial. Measures gauging the influence of morphological relatives of the target were facilitative, while measures gauging the influence of words related only in form were inhibitory. A second study analyzing data from the English Lexicon Project, for a large sample of words from across the full frequency range, supports these conclusions. An information-theoretical analysis of root and surface frequency explains why surface frequency must be the most important predictor, with only a marginal role for root frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study makes a preliminary introduction handling the problem of parsing ‘Inflection’ and demonstrating the opinions of Arab linguists of old and modern times alike, and the Orientalists' contribution on the authenticity of parsing in Arabic language. The study then discusses the purpose of this paper and the syllabic nature of the Arabic acoustic system. It also presents a reading about the consequence of absence of parsing the vowels dammah and fathah, This study aims to reveal the role that the consequence of the absence of vowel points that mark the and kasrah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Semantic anomalies like “the fox that hunted the poacher” elicit P600 effects. Kolk et al. [Kolk, H.J., Chwilla, D.J., Van Herten, M., Oor, P.J.W., 2003. Structure and limited capacity in verbal working memory: a study with event related potentials. Brain and language, 85(1), 1–36] proposed that this P600 effect is triggered by a conflict between the outcome of a lexical strategy with that of the parsing routine. Specifically, when the lexical strategy indicates that the poacher hunted the fox, the full parse leads to the conclusion that the fox was the one who did the hunting. We tested this hypothesis by replicating the study cited above but manipulating the context by means of instruction. Participants were informed that semantic anomalies were created on purpose and that they should not be misled by these anomalies but instead focus on syntax or sentence structure. This instruction led to a strong reduction in P600 effect. This result supports the view that expectations play an important role in the generation of P600 effects to semantic anomalies, as proposed by Kolk et al. [Kolk, H.J., Chwilla, D.J., Van Herten, M., Oor, P.J.W., 2003. Structure and limited capacity in verbal working memory: a study with event related potentials. Brain and language, 85(1), 1–36]. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We present an experimental investigation of the role of resumptive pronouns. We investigate object extraction in WH-questions for a range of syntactic configurations (nonislands, weak islands, strong islands) and for multiple levels of embedding (single, double, and triple). In order to establish the crosslinguistic properties of resumption, parallel experiments were conducted in three languages, viz. English, Greek, and German. Three main experimental results are reported. First, resumption does not remedy island violations: resumptive pronominals are at most as acceptable as gaps, but not more acceptable. This result disconfirms claims in the literature that resumptives can 'save' island violations. Second, embedding reduces acceptability even in extraction out of nonislands and declaratives, structures standardly assumed to be fully grammatical. Third, nonislands and weak islands pattern together and contrast with strong islands in terms of the effect of resumption and embedding. Our experimental findings show a remarkable consistency across the three languages we investigate; crosslinguistic variation appears confined to quantitative differences in crosslinguistically identical principles. We argue that these experimental results can be explained by the interaction of grammatical principles with resource limitations of the human parser. In particular, extraction from nonislands and weak islands imposes increased demands on the computational resources of the parser. We extend Gibson's (1998) syntactic prediction locality theory in order to formalize this intuition and account for the processing complexity of A-bar dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The ambiguity concerned whether a relative clause (RC) that appeared after a complex noun phrase (NP) was interpreted as modifying the first or the second noun in the complex NP (El policía arrestó a la hermana del criado que estaba enferma desde hacía tiempo). The results showed that whereas the Spanish monolingual speakers and the Spanish–English bilinguals with limited exposure reliably attached the relative clause to the first noun, the Spanish–English bilingual with extensive exposure attached the relative to the second noun. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence parsing most consistent with the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information on subcategorization and selectional restrictions in a valency dictionary is important for natural language processing tasks such as monolingual parsing, accurate rule-based machine translation and automatic summarization. In this paper we present an efficient method of assigning valency information and selectional restrictions to entries in a bilingual dictionary, based on information in an existing valency dictionary. The method is based on two assumptions: words with similar meaning have similar subcategorization frames and selectional restrictions; and words with the same translations have similar meanings. Based on these assumptions, new valency entries are constructed for words in a plain bilingual dictionary, using entries with similar source-language meaning and the same target-language translations. We evaluate the effects of various measures of semantic similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the role of working memory in sentence comprehension has received substantial attention, the nature of this relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction between general, nonverbal working memory (WM) and sentence parsing (SP) in normal English-speaking adults. Accuracy and reaction times were recorded for thirty-one young adults during three on-line tasks: nonverbal WM, SP plausibility, and lexical decision (LD). A significant positive correlation was observed between reaction times for WM and SP, but not between LD and SP. These results suggest that SP may be supported by a general WM capacity, and therefore, some sentence comprehension difficulties observed in the clinical population may potentially be related to impairment in general WM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exemplar-based models of language propose that human language production and understanding operate with a store of concrete linguistic experiences rather than with abstract linguistic rules. While exemplar-based models are well acknowledged in areas like phonology and morphology, common wisdom has it that they are intrinsically flawed for syntax where infinite generative capacity is needed. This article shows that this common wisdom is wrong. It starts out by reviewing an exemplar-based syntactic model, known as Data-Oriented Parsing, or DOP, which operates on a corpus of phrase-structure trees. While this model is productive, it is inadequate from the point of grammatical productivity. We therefore extend it to the more sophisticated linguistic representations proposed by Lexical-Functional Grammar theory, resulting in the model known as LFG-DOP, which does allow for meta-linguistic judgments of acceptability. We show how DOP deals with first language acquisition, suggesting a unified model for language learning and language use, and go into a number of syntactic phenomena that can be explained by DOP but that challenge rule-based models. We argue that if there is anything innate in language cognition it is not Universal Grammar but "Universal Representation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments and adjuncts are initially processed in the same manner, following a general bias to attach prepositional phrases to the verb phrase whenever possible [Clifton, Speer, & Abney (1991) Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 251–271]. The current study supports the hypothesis for differential processing, even during the initial stages of syntactic analysis. In an eye movement experiment, readers spent less first-pass time on argument prepositional phrases (PPs) than adjunct PPs. The results support a view in which a noun’s or verb’s argument structure can facilitate the analysis of its arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsupervised morphological analysis is the task of segmenting words into prefixes, suffixes and stems without prior knowledge of language-specific morphotactics and morpho-phonological rules. This paper introduces a simple, yet highly effective algorithm for unsupervised morphological learning for Bengali, an Indo–Aryan language that is highly inflectional in nature. When evaluated on a set of 4,110 human-segmented Bengali words, our algorithm achieves an F-score of 83%, substantially outperforming Linguistica, one of the most widely-used unsupervised morphological parsers, by about 23%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spoken monologues feature greater sentence length and structural complexity than spoken dialogues. To achieve high-parsing performance for spoken monologues, simplifying the structure by dividing a sentence into suitable language units could prove effective. This paper proposes a method for dependency parsing of Japanese spoken monologues based on sentence segmentation. In this method, dependency parsing is executed in two stages: at the clause level and the sentence level. First, dependencies within a clause are identified by dividing a sentence into clauses and executing stochastic dependency parsing for each clause. Next, dependencies across clause boundaries are identified stochastically, and the dependency structure of the entire sentence is thus completed. An experiment using a spoken monologue corpus shows the effectiveness of this method for efficient dependency parsing of Japanese monologue sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the art of parsing in Tamil language. Parsing is actually related to the automatic analysis of texts according to a grammar. Parsing is used to refer to practice of assigning syntactic structure to a text. It is usually performed after basic morphosyntactic categories which have been identified in a text.

In order to investigate second language (L2) processing at ultimate attainment, 20 first language (L1) English and 20 L1 Dutch advanced to near-native speakers of German as well as 20 native Germans were tested in two experiments on subject–object ambiguities in German. The results from a self-paced reading task and a speeded acceptability judgement task show that the lower-proficient advanced learners in this study display the same processing preferences as natives in reading accuracy yet fail to demonstrate differential response latencies associated with native syntactic reanalysis. By contrast, near-native speakers of either L1 converge on incremental native reanalysis patterns. Together, the findings highlight the role of proficiency for processing the target language since it is only at near-native levels of proficiency that non-natives converge on native-like parsing. The results support the view that endstate non-native processing and native processing are qualitatively identical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the use of beat gestures (typically the sharp up-and-down movement of the hand) in conjunction with L2 speech production. The L2 participant, although in conversation with another person, synchronized his beats with the parsing of his words into syllables. Based on Gal' perin's formulation for the process of internalization, that the ideal or mental plane is built upon activity in the physical world (material plane), it is argued that the L2 participant deployed this metaphoric form of gesture as a multimodal, actional representation of syllabification to both externalize the phenomena to gain control over it (self-regulation) and to help solidify a conceptual foundation for this aspect of the underlying rhythmic pulse of English. Moreover, it is speculated that movement itself might prove to be part of SLA, that it establishes a physicalized (kinesic) sense of prosodic features of the L2, promoting automaticity and fluency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Two eye movement experiments explored the roles of verbal subcategorization possibilities and transitivity biases in the processing of heavy NP shift sentences in which the verb’s direct object appears to the right of a post-verbal phrase. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which a prepositional phrase immediately followed the verb, which was either obligatorily transitive or had a high transitivity bias (e.g., Jack praised/watched from the stands his daughter’s attempt to shoot a basket). Experiment 2 compared unshifted sentences to sentences in which an adverb intervened between the verb and its object, and obligatorily transitive verbs to optionally transitive verbs with widely varying transitivity biases. In both experiments, evidence of processing difficulty appeared on the material that intervened between the verb and its object when the verb was obligatorily transitive, and on the shifted direct object when the verb was optionally transitive, regardless of transitivity bias. We conclude that the parser adopts the heavy NP shift analysis only when it is forced to by the grammar, which we interpret in terms of a preference for immediate incremental interpretation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study investigates how the parser employs thematic and contextual information in resolving temporary ambiguities during sentence processing. We report results from a sentence-completion task and from a self-paced reading experiment with native speakers of Greek examining two constructions under different referential context conditions: relative clauses (RCs) preceded by complex noun phrases with genitives, [NP1 +NP2Gen], and RCs preceded by complex noun phrases containing prepositional phrases, [NP1 + PP[P NP2]]. We found different attachment preferences for these two constructions, a high (NP1) preference for RCs with genitive antecedents and a low (NP2) preference for RCs with PP antecedents. Moreover, referential context information was found to modulate RC attachment differently in the two experimental tasks. We interpret these findings from the perspective of modular theories of sentence processing and argue that on-line ambiguity resolution relies primarily on grammatical and lexical-thematic information, and makes use of referential context information only as a secondary resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a summary of a dissertation that focuses on evidence from the Greek language that supports the role of segmental sandhi in the parsing of speech. The dissertation examines the relationship between prosodic and syntactic structure and segmental allophonic processes at the edges of words in Greek. It investigates the exact phonetic nature of segmental sandhi and tries to understand whether such processes result in deterministically categorical segmental changes or in probalistic and continuous variation. The processing of structurally ambiguous sentences is examined. The article tries to determine whether there is a relationship between the various outcomes of segmental sandhi and particular morphosyntactic structures.

Chimila has a tone system in which lexical tone contrasts with its absence. The analysis presented in this paper focuses on the interactions of phonetic and lexical tone with the metrical system, surface (phonetic) segments, and the resulting syllable structure. With regard to its lexical structure, the tonal system of Chimila is rather humdrum, as tone systems go. Instead, the uniqueness of Chimilas' tone system lies in its interaction with surface metrical structure to create surface segments (lengthened consonants and syllable-final nasal consonants) which do not appear in underlying lexical structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their Keynote Article, Clahsen and Felser (CF) provide a detailed summary and comparison of grammatical processing in adult first language (L1) speakers, child L1 speakers, and second language (L2) speakers. CF conclude that child and adult L1 processing makes use of a continuous parsing mechanism, and that any differences found in processing can be explained by factors such as limited working memory capacity and incomplete lexical knowledge. The authors then suggest that the existing differences between L1 (both adult and child) and L2 processing provide evidence that parsing mechanisms are qualitatively different between these groups. They posit that this qualitative difference between L1 and L2 is due to L2 speakers having shallower and less detailed syntactic representations than L1 speakers. This commentary focuses on discussing this shallow structures account and considers what this means for L2 processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anterior negativities obtained when a grammatical rule is violated may reflect highly automatic first-pass parsing processes, the detection of a morphosyntactic mismatch, and/or the inability to assign the incoming word to the current phrase structure. However, for some theorists these negativities rather reflect some aspect of working memory processes. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) obtained for word category and morphosyntactic violations were directly compared with effects obtained when working memory is particularly demanded (embedding subject- or object-relative clauses), yielding a significant dissociation in terms of topography. Even though, the anterior negativities for grammatical violations vanished when relative clauses were embedded, suggesting that the processes reflected by anterior negativities related to grammatical violations and those related to working memory manipulations, even if different, are placing demands on a common pool of limited resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Prediction-inconsistent adjectives elicited a differential ERP effect, which disappeared in a no-discourse control experiment. Furthermore, in self-paced reading, prediction-inconsistent adjectives slowed readers down before the noun. These findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]