Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Sentence processing (922)
Sentence processing - Serial and parallel models
Readings
Altman, G. T. M. 1998. Ambiguity in sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences
2 (4), 146-152
More background reading: Garman, M. 1990. Psycholinguistics. Cambridge University
Press. Pp. 301-320
What does it mean to understand an utterance?
What kind of information is used during processing?
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Understand the linguistic information:
 The linguistic message
 The linguistic context
Introduce information which is not in the linguistic message or context
 Visual information
 General world knowledge
 Individual knowledge.
How does the different aspects of understanding interact?
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
Flowchart – serial processing
Network – parallel processing, distributed memory
Parsing
Understanding a linguistic message with no linguistic context, visual information or other
information – focusing on the hearer’s/reader's task.
1.
2.
The horse [raced past the barn] fell
The horse the donkey the girl liked raced won
Top-Down or Bottom-up
Top-Down: letter recognition is influenced by the lexical (higher) level of representation
Parsing Principles (Kimball 1973)
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Top-down (from the highest level) - “Parsing in natural languages proceeds
according to a top-down algorithm”
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Sentence processing (922)
The parser assumes that it builds a sentence using the rules:
S NP VP
VP V NP
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3.
4.
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Right association (to non-terminal nodes) - “Terminal symbols optimally
associate to the lowest non-terminal node”
The girl took the job that was attractive
The girl went to NY that was attractive
New nodes (function words) – "The construction of a new node is signaled by the
occurrence of a grammatical function word”
How is this related to garden path sentences?
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5.
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6.
Two sentences - “The constituents of no more than two sentences can be parsed at
the same time”
The horse [ the donkey [ the girl liked ] raced ] won
Closure - “A phrase is closed as soon as possible, i.e., unless the next node parsed
is an immediate constituent of the phrase”.
Since Jay always walks a mile seems like a short distance to him
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Fixed structure (look ahead) – “When the last constituent of the phrase has been
formed, and the phrase is closed, it is costly in terms of perceptual complexity
ever to have to go back to reorganize the constituents of that phrase”
7.
The girl pushed through the window cried
(But: The girl thrown through the window cried)

Processing (serial) - “When a phrase is closed it is pushed down into a syntactic
(possibly semantic) processing stage and cleared from short term memory”
This helps explain principle 6.
Automatic or controlled? (Stroop test)
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Sentence processing (922)
Serial and parallel models
How is parsing related to lexical access?
There are three logical orders:
1. Parsing before lexical access
2. Lexical access before parser
3. Lexical access and parsing occur together
Parsing before lexical access
JABBERWOCKY
It was brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
(Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll)
Lexical access before parsing: Serial models
Lexical processing > Storage of lexical items (Short term memory) > Parsing
Miller (1956): The capacity of short-term memory is 7 items (plus or minus two)
8.
I was reading this morning in the / paper about a man who is a / director of a
big company in England / who was the world’s number one producer / of
textiles who was great supporter of / the labor party over the last ten years.
Sausage machine (Frazier and Fodor 1978):
Lexical & phrasal nodes are assigned to short strings (roughly 6 words) > higher nodes
are added creating a complete phrase marker.
Minimal attachment – We do not open a new syntactic node unless we absolutely have to
>>> we prefer to attach a new node to already present nodes.
9.
Joe bought the book for Susan
10.
Joe bought the book that I was trying to find for Susan
11.
The burglar blew open the safe with the dynamite
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Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Sentence processing (922)
Lexical access and parsing occur together: Parallel models
Word monitoring experiments – listen for a particular word in a list or a sentence.
Listen for a word that sounds like the target (rhyme monitoring)
Listen for a word that means the target (category monitoring)
Marslen-Wilson and Tyler (1975): The target word is trout.
12.
13.
Max, live, tea, clock, trout
Mary likes to cook trout.
Facilitation effect for category monitoring where there is a syntactic and semantic context
>>> Parallel interactive model
Lexical ambiguities
BANK
14.
15.
16.
The meeting at the bank was very romantic
The sailors tied the boat to the bank
The clerk left the money at the bank
Automatic (spreading activation)
Attentional processing (using conscious strategies).
Altman, 1998
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•
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Syntactic processing cannot deal with multiple constraints
Multiple meanings of an ambiguous word are activated briefly
Frequency of meaning determines the activation
Biasing context can activate one alternative over the other
17.
18.
The horse raced past the burn fell
The horse ridden past the burn fell
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