A PDP Approach to Processing Center-Embedded Sentences (1992)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
| Citations: | 16 - 2 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Weckerly92apdp,
author = {Jill Weckerly and Jeffrey L. Elman},
title = {A PDP Approach to Processing Center-Embedded Sentences},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
year = {1992},
pages = {414--419},
publisher = {Erlbaum}
}
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Abstract
Recent PDP models have been shown to have great promise in contributing to the understanding of the mechanisms which subserve language processing. In this paper we address the specific question of how multiply embedded sentences might be processed. It has been shown experimentally that comprehension of center-embedded structures is poor relative to right-branching structures. It also has been demonstrated that this effect can be attenuated, such that the presence of semantically constrained lexical items in center-embedded sentences improves processing performance. This raises two questions: (1) What is it about the processing mechanism that makes center-embedded sentences relatively difficult? (2) How are the effects of semantic bias accounted for? Following an approach outlined in Elman (1990, 1991), we train a simple recurrent network in a prediction task on various syntactic structures, including center-embedded and right-branching sentences. As the results show, the behavior of ...
