In the literature dealing with the reanalysis of garden path sentences such as While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods, it is generally assumed that people either completely repair their initial incorrect syntactic representations yielding a final interpretation whose syntactic structure is fully consistent with the input string, or that the parse fails. In a series of five experiments, we explored the possibility that partial reanalyses take place. Specifically, we examined the conditions under which part of the initial incorrect analysis persists at the same time that part of the correct final analysis is constructed. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we found that both the length of the ambiguous region and the plausibility of the ultimate interpretation affected the likelihood that such sentences would be fully reanalyzed. In Experiment 2, we compared garden path sentences with non-garden path sentences and compared performance on two different types of comprehension questions. In...

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An extension to classicM unification, called graded unification is presented. It is capable of combining contradictory information. An interactive processing paradigm and parser based on this new operator are also presented.

Developing a complete and well-specified computational model of human language processing is a difficult problem. Natural language understanding requires the application of many different kinds of knowledge such as syntactic, semantic, and conceptual knowledge. To account for the variety of constructs possible in natural languages and to explain the variety of human behavior in sentence understanding, each kind of knowledge must be applicable independently of others. However, in order to efficiently resolve the many kinds of ambiguities that abound in natural languages, the sentence processor must integrate information available from different knowledge sources as soon as it can. Such early commitment in ambiguity resolution calls for an ability to recover from possible errors in commitment. In this work, we propose a unified-process, multiple knowledge-source model of sentence understanding that satisfies all the constraints above. In this model, syntactic, semantic, and conceptual kn...

In line with recent studies we propose a model of human sentence processing that is based on Optimality Theory (OT). Rather than explaining parsing preferences through extralinguistically motivated parsing strategies or frequencies in the hearer’s linguistic environment, our model explains these preferences as the intermediate results of the incremental application of our OT grammar. In contrast to most other current OT-approaches to language processing, we use constraints from OT semantics rather than from OT syntax to explain on-line comprehension. We illustrate the workings of our model by investigating the comprehension of coordination, a phenomenon which is ill-understood from a competence perspective and sparsely investigated from a processing perspective. The psycholinguistic evidence that is currently available strongly suggests that the on-line comprehension of coordinate structures is influenced by constraints from many different information sources: pragmatics, discourse semantics, lexical semantics, and syntax. The competence / performance model we propose is able to formalize this cross-modular constraint interaction, and to yield concrete predictions with respect to both intermediate parsing preferences and ultimate interpretations.

Syntactic processes are an important component of the language processing system. While semantic and pragmatic information has been shown to influence the eventual interpretation of an utterance, psycholinguistic theories have not come to an agreement on how this information is combined with syntactic knowledge during the initial parsing process. This paper reviews recent psycholinguistic research on the effects of lexical information and discourse context on syntactic processing. The results of these studies are often contradictory, and do not allow to draw firm conclusions on how syntactic and non-syntactic processes interact. Nevertheless, it is suggested that the psychological evidence points towards a weakly interactive, parallel model of parsing. Methodological implications and further research directions are discussed, and an evaluation of text comprehension theories with respect to syntactic processing is attempted.

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 quickly find a good syntactic analysis. 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. 1

This report describes research done in the context of a subproject of the HPCN project IMPACT. The IMPACT project is headed by the ING bank and is founded by the organization for High Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN). The aim of the specific subproject, in the context of which this report has been written, is to develop (techniques for) natural language interfaces to information resources, focusing on the use of high-performance computers to achieve acceptable response times. This report is part of the "Parallel Parsing I" research topic.

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This work is concerned with the way in which principled theories of syntax and modular theories of mind may participate in an incremental model of human linguistic performance. Central to current linguistic theory is the distinction between competence, what we know about language, and performance, how we use that knowledge. While current theories of grammar suggest a highly modular, abstract, language universal characterisation of linguistic competence, traditional models of performance have postulated parsing strategies based on construction-oriented, phrase-structure grammars. In contrast, we construct a principled theory of performance on the basis of cross-linguistic evidence, with the aim of shedding greater light on the relationship between grammar and processing. On the basis of Fodor's Modularity Hypothesis and a range of empirical evidence, we assume the existence of a distinct syntactic processor within the human sentence processor. We further hypothesize The Principle of Inc...