Lecture notes
SENTENCE PROCESSING
- Module
- NEUROPSYCHOLOGY (PSY0661)
- Institution
- Northumbria University (UNN)
Lecture notes of 8 pages for the course NEUROPSYCHOLOGY at UNN (LECUTRE 12/15)
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Lecture 12 – sentence processingLecture plan;
Sentence comprehension- language comprehension;
- Speech perception focuses on lower-level processes (e.g. phonological access, word
segmentation).
- Sentence processing (SP) focuses on higher-level processes (i.e. syntactic, lexical, and
semantic analyses).
- Two main levels of analysis in SP:
- syntactic analysis (parsing)
- semantic analysis (mapping between syntax and meaning)
- Pragmatics studies the intended (vs. literal) meaning. E.g., humour.
- Discourse and text studies focus on how the meanings of individual
utterances/sentences are integrated at the level of the story.
Logic of speech comprehension;
- This tree structure is one way in which a
sentence can be produced.
- Can also be seen in a linear model
Sentence processing terminology;
- Parsing = the process of building a syntactic representation during sentence
understanding. Leads to assigning the incoming words to their positions in a
sentence (syntactic nodes) and deriving the meaning
- Parser = abstract sentence processor
- Parse = a temporarily built interpretation (structure) in case of local ambiguity
Methods used to understand sentence processing;
- Monitoring tasks (phoneme, word, etc…)
- Probing and priming tasks
- Self-paced reading
- Eye movements in reading (and in the visual world)
- Neuroscience of SP (ERP, MEG, MRI, TMS)
, Ambiguity;
- Ambiguity is one of the most widely used tools for studying sentence production
- Understood in two levels = Global or local
Global;
- A sentence is globally ambiguous if it has multiple interpretations as a whole
- “Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony”
- “The cop chased the criminal with a fast car”
- “She sat on the chair covered in dust”
- “Time flies like an arrow “How many interpretations?
- Time moves as quickly as an arrow.
- A special kind of fly, “time fly”, likes arrows.
- Measure the speed of flies like you would measure the speed of an arrows!
- Unless prompted toward alternative(s), comprehenders are typically aware of the
most frequent/typical interpretation.
Syntactic trees;
- splitting up sentences, these can be simple or complex trees.
- Within a syntactic tree you can have high attachments phrases
and low attachment phrases
- e.g. the tourist used the telescope to see the astronomer. This
is a high attachment
- e.g. the astronomer saw that the tourist has a telescope. This is
low attachment.
Local ambiguity;
- Local ambiguities are different from global ambiguities as they are available only for
a short period – typically, at initial processing stages
- Once the remainder of the sentence is available, only one interpretation remains
- E.g. ‘the old train…’ this could mean about someone training or an actually train
- But when given the rest of the sentence ‘the old train…the young’ you know it can
only mean about training someone.
Garden path sentences;
- Garden-path sentences are somewhat artificial and infrequent (like speech errors).
They typically occur in written but not in spoken discourse.
- In written discourse, they can be disambiguated by punctuation e.g. “While Anna
dressed, the baby played on the floor”
- In spoken discourse, they can be disambiguated by intonation/stress/pauses
(Steinhauer & Friederici 2001; Frazier et al 2006; Snedeker & Trueswell 2003).
- A garden path occurs when the processor initially tries to build a wrong structure
causing a “dead-end" parse when later (disambiguating) input is inconsistent with
the initially predicted structure
- In this case, processor must “backtrack” and revise the parse. As a result, GP
sentences take longer to read, and they are often accompanied by reverse eye-
movements (regressions)
- Some garden paths are so strong that the parser may fail to recover from them e.g.,
“Fat people eat accumulates” = ‘fat - (that) people eat – accumulates’
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