Modeling the Influence of Thematic Fit (and Other Constraints) in On-line Sentence Comprehension

Masamune, Ken; Spivey-Knowlton, Michael J.; Tanenhaus, Michael K.

doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2543

Cited by 554 publications

(644 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(10 reference statements)

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“…Experiment 1 demonstrated how specific conversational partners might influence the particular words a speaker might select, while Experiment 2 demonstrated how particular partners could shape the conceptual information available to speakers during message planning. Both of these effects are consistent with related constraint-based approaches that view language processing as involving the simultaneous integration of multiple types of information, both linguistic and non-linguistic (e.g., MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994;McRae, Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998). Such models have considered, for example, how factors like lexical frequency and contextual plausibility can serve to constrain the likelihood of particular sentence parses.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

The influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production: Evidence from picture naming

Horton

2007

Language and Cognitive Processes

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In typical interactions, speakers frequently produce utterances that appear to reflect beliefs about the common ground shared with particular addressees. Horton and Gerrig (2005a) proposed that one important basis for audience design is the manner in which conversational partners serve as cues for the automatic retrieval of associated information from memory. This paper reports the results of two experiments demonstrating the influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production. Following an initial task designed to establish associations between specific words (Experiment 1) or object categories (Experiment 2) and each of two partners, participants named a series of pictures in the context of the same two individuals. Naming latencies were shortest for responses associated with the current partner, and were not significantly correlated with explicit recall of partner-item associations. Such partner-driven memory retrieval may constrain the information accessible to speakers as they produce utterances for particular addressees.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

The influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production: Evidence from picture naming

Horton

2007

Language and Cognitive Processes

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“…It is important to note however, that such adaptation based on linguistic experience does not necessitate mechanisms which are strictly based on frequency-based estimations of likelihood (Pickering et al, 2000). Furthermore, different kinds and grains of frequencies may interact or be combined in complex ways (McRae et al, 1998).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A number of studies have demonstrated the importance of lexical frequencies. These frequencies can be categorical (e.g., the most frequent part of speech for an ambiguous word, Crocker & Corley 2002), morphological (e.g., the tendency of a verb to occur in a particular tense, Trueswell 1996), syntactic (e.g., the tendency of a verb to occur with a particular frame, as discussed above, Ford et al 1982;Garnsey et al 1997;Trueswell et al 1993), or semantic (e.g., the tendency of a noun to occur as the object of a particular verb, Garnsey et al 1997;McRae et al 1998;Pickering et al 2000). It has been generally argued that these different types of lexical frequencies form a set of interacting constraints that determine the preferred parse for a given sentence (MacDonald, 1994;MacDonald et al, 1994;Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994).…”

Section: The Role Of Experience In Sentence Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Probabilistic Grammars as Models of Gradience in Language Processing

Crocker¹,

Keller²

2006

Gradience in Grammar

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This article deals with gradience in human sentence processing. We review the experimental evidence for the role of experience in guiding the decisions of the sentence processor. Based on this evidence, we argue that the gradient behavior observed in the processing of certain syntactic constructions can be traced back to the amount of past experience that the processor has had with these constructions. In modeling terms, linguistic experience can be approximated using large, balanced corpora. We give an overview of corpus-based and probabilistic models in the literature that have exploited this fact, and hence are well placed to make gradient predictions about processing behavior. Finally, we discuss a number of questions regarding the relationship between gradience in sentence processing and gradient grammaticality, and come to the conclusion that these two phenomena should be treated separately in conceptual and modeling terms.

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“…A number of other theories of syntactic processing complexity exist, including dynamic system models (e.g., McRae, Spivey-Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998;Tabor & Tanenhaus, 1999) and neural net models (e.g., Elman, 1991). However, in the present paper, we will focus on DLT and surprisal, as these two approaches are maximally different from each other.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity

2008

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We evaluate the predictions of two theories of syntactic processing complexity, dependency locality theory (DLT) and surprisal, against the Dundee corpus, which contains the eye-tracking record of 10 participants reading 51,000 words of newspaper text. Our results show that DLT integration cost is not a significant predictor of reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. However, DLT successfully predicts reading times for nouns and verbs. We also find evidence for integration cost effects at auxiliaries, not predicted by DLT. For surprisal, we demonstrate that an unlexicalized formulation of surprisal can predict reading times for arbitrary words in the corpus. Comparing DLT integration cost and surprisal, we find that the two measures are uncorrelated, which suggests that a complete theory will need to incorporate both aspects of processing complexity. We conclude that eye-tracking corpora, which provide reading time data for naturally occurring, contextualized sentences, can complement experimental evidence as a basis for theories of processing complexity.

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Modeling the Influence of Thematic Fit (and Other Constraints) in On-line Sentence Comprehension

Cited by 554 publications

References 33 publications

The influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production: Evidence from picture naming

The influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production: Evidence from picture naming

Probabilistic Grammars as Models of Gradience in Language Processing

Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity

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