Ted Gibson (MIT)
December 4, 2007
Interactions between top-down and bottom-up information constraints in language
comprehension
Abstract:
In this talk, I will present theories and evidence addressing the question of how people
combine syntactic and lexical information in sentence understanding. The resolution of
syntactic category ambiguities is used as a testbed for this purpose (e.g., "duck", “train” or
“play” as a noun or a verb; "that" as a complementizer or a determiner). It is proposed that
people combine (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical
information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up
statistical information) independently in order to resolve these ambiguities.