A computational model of human parsing

Abney, Steven

doi:10.1007/bf01069051

Cited by 140 publications

(108 citation statements)

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“…Liversedge et al (1998) argued that readers prefer to process ambiguous phrases initially as arguments rather than as adjuncts. In accord with the predictions of Abney (1989), Schütze and Gibson (1999) found a preference for argument over adjunct (modifier) interpretations, using prepositional phrase modifiers in sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. In fact, their results showed that this preference was suff iciently strong that it outweighed any preference for adopting the minimal attachment analysis (Clifton et al, 1991;Frazier, 1987;Rayner et al, 1983).…”

supporting

confidence: 63%

“…It is not surprising, therefore, that psycholinguists have investigated how they are encoded and how they affect comprehension (e.g., Abney, 1989;Carlson & Tanenhaus, 1988;Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991;Ferretti, McCrae, & Hatherall, 2001;Liversedge, Pickering, Branigan, & Van Gompel, 1998;Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983;Schütze & Gibson, 1999). In this paper, we report an eye-tracking investigation of thematic role assignment during the comprehension of sentences containing ambiguous adjuncts.…”

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Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

Liversedge

Pickering

Clayes

et al. 2003

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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We investigated thematic processing in sentences containing a prepositional phrase that was ambiguous between a locative and a temporal interpretation. We manipulated context (temporal or locative), target sentence (temporal or locative), and whether or not the main verb of the target and the context was repeated. Results showed that context dictated the participants' thematic expectations. Thematically, congruent target and context pairs were read faster than incongruent pairs. This effect was not modulated by verb repetition. We argue that wh-words cause readers to lodge semantically vacuous thematic roles in their discourse representation that bias a reader's interpretation of subsequent thematically ambiguous adjuncts in their discourse representation.

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confidence: 63%

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confidence: 99%

Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

Liversedge

Pickering

Clayes

et al. 2003

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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“…For example, some authors have proposed that syntactic structure is projected from the heads of phrases (Abney, 1989;MacDonald, Perlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994;Pritchett, 1992). On this view, the parser must wait until the head of a phrase is encountered before attaching any other material that is part of the phrase.…”

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Syntactic prediction in language comprehension: Evidence from either...or.

Staub

Clifton²

2006

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

186

169

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Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly, across both sentence types. In addition, there was evidence that readers misanalyzed the S-coordination structure as an NPcoordination structure only when either was absent. The authors interpret the results as indicating that the word either enabled readers to predict the arrival of a coordination structure; this predictive activation facilitated processing of this structure when it ultimately arrived, and in the case of Scoordination sentences, enabled readers to avoid the incorrect NP-coordination analysis. The authors argue that these results support parsing theories according to which the parser can build predictable syntactic structure before encountering the corresponding lexical input.

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“…detailed lexical information stored with individual words is the only source of sentence structure (Abney, 1987(Abney, , 1989Boland & Tanenhaus, 1991;Frazier, 1985Frazier, , 1989Frazier, , 1990Gibson, 1990;Hemforth, Konieczny, Scheepers, & Strube, 1994;Pritchett, 1988Pritchett, , 1992Tanenhaus, Boland, Mauner, & Carlson, 1993;Weinberg, 1995). Mitchell (1987) provided evidence against models claiming that initial syntactic analyses could not violate lexical subcategorization requirements and favoring models claiming that initial analyses reflected general grammatical principles.…”

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confidence: 99%

Lexical guidance in sentence processing?

Adams

Clifton

Mitchell

1998

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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An eyetracking experiment was conducted to explore a self-paced reading effect reported by Mitchell (1987), Mitchell found that a noun phrase (NP) was read slowly when it immediately followed an intransitive verb, as long as the verb and NP appeared in the same presentation region, This effect has been used to support the claim that verb subcategorization information is not used initially in sentence parsing. However, the effect did not appear in the eyetracking experiment reported in the present paper, supporting criticisms that Mitchell's segmentation procedure distorted the parsing process.Understanding a sentence involves, among many other factors, determining the syntactic relations among the words and phrases ofa sentence. For instance, in After the dog scratched the veterinarian ... , a reader or listener must decide whether the noun phrase (NP) the veterinarian following the verb scratch is the direct object of that verb or whether it is the subject of a new clause. In this process of"parsing" a sentence, readers and listeners must obey the grammatical principles of their language, and they must also honor the lexical requirements ofthe words in the sentence. They must, for example, eliminate an analysis that treats an NP following a purely intransitive verb such as struggle as its direct object.The present paper reexamines some often-cited evidence (Mitchell, 1987) about how lexical information, such as verb transitivity, is used in parsing. This evidence has been taken as a strong argument that sentence structure is created on the basis of general principles and not simply retrieved from memory as configurations prestored with lexical items. To our disappointment, we conclude that the evidence cannot be taken at face value and that other arguments must be developed to decide whether parsing is a matter of structure building or structure retrieval.There is substantial agreement that such lexical subcategorization information (information about the possi- ble phrasal complements of a verb or other word) is used quickly, within a period of 0.4-2 sec of word processing (see Boland & Tanenhaus, 1991;Ferreira & Henderson, 1991;Frazier, 1989;Mitchell, 1989Mitchell, , 1994Tanenhaus, Carlson, & Trueswell, 1989; and Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993, for reviews). However, there is considerable disagreement about the precise mechanism by which subcategorization information is used. At one extreme are models that maintain that only major category information, such as noun or verb, and phrase structure rules are used in assembling the initial structure, Such models have been entertained by Frazier (1987aFrazier ( , 1989 and by Mitchell (1987Mitchell ( , 1989. These models claim that detailed lexical information plays its role only after an initial structure is built, filtering out analyses that violate lexical constraints.At the other extreme are "lexical guidance" theories, which hold that specific lexical information is the only source of syntactic structure, Ford, Bresnan, and Kaplan (1982) suggest that the l...

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A computational model of human parsing

Cited by 140 publications

References 7 publications

Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment

Syntactic prediction in language comprehension: Evidence from either...or.

Lexical guidance in sentence processing?

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