Is human sentence parsing serial or parallel?

Abstract

In this ERP study we investigate the processes that occur in syntactically ambiguous German sentences at the point of disambiguation. Whereas most psycholinguistic theories agree on the view that processing difficulties arise when parsing preferences are disconfirmed (so-called garden-path effects), important differences exist with respect to theoretical assumptions about the parser's recovery from a misparse. A key distinction can be made between parsers that compute all alternative syntactic structures in parallel (parallel parsers) and parsers that compute only a single preferred analysis (serial parsers). To distinguish empirically between parallel and serial parsing models, we compare ERP responses to garden-path sentences with ERP responses to truly ungrammatical sentences. Garden-path sentences contain a temporary and ultimately curable ungrammaticality, whereas truly ungrammatical sentences remain so permanentlya difference which gives rise to different predictions in the two classes of parsing architectures. At the disambiguating word, ERPs in both sentence types show negative shifts of similar onset latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution in an initial time window between 300 and 500 ms. In a following time window (500-700 ms), the negative shift to garden-path sentences disappears at right central parietal sites, while it continues in permanently ungrammatical sentences. These data are taken as evidence for a strictly serial parser. The absence of a difference in the early time window indicates that temporary and permanent ungrammaticalities trigger the same kind of parsing responses. Later differences can be related to successful reanalysis in garden-path but not in ungrammatical sentences. Theme: Neural basis of behaviorTopic: Cognition

Differential Electrophysiological Signatures of Semantic and Syntactic Scene Processing

“…This would follow findings with linguistic stimuli where extremely ungrammatical sentences do not elicit at P600 response (see Hopf, Bader, Meng, & Bayer, 2003). This might also explain Demiral et al's (2012) lack of P600 responses, while they instead observed early N300-N400 effects.…”

Processing Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for the Subject-Relative Advantage

“…If the parser is ranked parallel, then the relatively high frequency of subject relatives could facilitate processing even in the pre-head noun regions, where the most probable structure is a non-RC. Although the serial versus parallel parser issue was never really resolved in the literature [53]–[55], we follow [56], and [37], [10]–[11] in assuming a ranked parallel parser. Under this view, multiple possible structures are maintained in memory but with different ranks (determined by the probability of each parse).…”

Real-Time Parallel Processing of Grammatical Structure in the Fronto-Striatal System: A Recurrent Network Simulation Study Using Reservoir Computing

“…Interestingly, this is consistent with the neural activity we observe in the striatal readout neurons – multiple parses are maintained, based on their probability within the corpus – analogous to the notions of “preferred” and “non-preferred.” These results are pertinent within the psycholinguistics community, where a debate continues concerning whether human sentence processing is based on always maintaining the single, best current parse candidate (serial processing) or rather, maintaining multiple open options, and pruning and updating these options as the sentence unfolds (parallel processing) [22], [60], [61]. One of the arguments against parallel processing is related to the cost and difficulty of maintaining multiple, parallel parses.…”