Memory mechanisms supporting syntactic comprehension

Expectation-based syntactic comprehension.

This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates its equivalence to the theory ...

Syntactic Adaptation in Language Comprehension

In this paper we investigate the manner in which the human language comprehension system adapts to shifts in probability distributions over syntactic structures, given experimentally controlled experience with those structures. We replicate a classic reading experiment, and present a model of the behavioral data that implements a form of Bayesian belief update over the course of the experiment.

Memory-based Syntactic Processing Memory-based Syntactic Processing Background

Syntactic comprehension in agrammatism: A computational model

In this paper we present a detailed computational model of agrammatic aphasia that is consistent with the Slow Syntax Hypothesis. In particular, our model postulates that the cause of the slowing of syntax processing is a deficit in overcoming irrelevant active lexical cues. This causes interference in retrieval of lexical and semantic information, which in turn causes a misrepresentation of se...

Effects of Syntactic Complexity in Discourse Comprehension

Comprehension deficits of spoken language have been widely described subsequent to damage to the left hemisphere (Nicholas and Brookshire, 1995). Research to date has primarily focused on comprehension of isolated words or sentences in persons with aphasia (pwa) (Yasuda, Nakamura & Beckman 2000). However, a few studies have suggested that pwa use heuristics (context and general knowledge) to fa...