Structure before Meaning: Sentence Processing, Plausibility, and Subcategorization

Structure before Meaning: Sentence Processing, Plausibility, and Subcategorization

Natural language processing is a fast and automatized process. A crucial part of this process is parsing, the online incremental construction of a syntactic structure. The aim of this study was to test whether a wh-filler extracted from an embedded clause is initially attached as the object of the matrix verb with subsequent reanalysis, and if so, whether the plausibility of such an attachment ...

Uncertainty and Expectation in Sentence Processing: Evidence From Subcategorization Distributions

There is now considerable evidence that human sentence processing is expectation based: As people read a sentence, they use their statistical experience with their language to generate predictions about upcoming syntactic structure. This study examines how sentence processing is affected by readers' uncertainty about those expectations. In a self-paced reading study, we use lexical subcategoriz...

A Probabilistic Model of Semantic Plausibility in Sentence Processing

Experimental research shows that human sentence processing uses information from different levels of linguistic analysis, for example, lexical and syntactic preferences as well as semantic plausibility. Existing computational models of human sentence processing, however, have focused primarily on lexico-syntactic factors. Those models that do account for semantic plausibility effects lack a gen...

Modelling Semantic Role Plausibility in Human Sentence Processing

We present the psycholinguistically motivated task of predicting human plausibility judgements for verb-role-argument triples and introduce a probabilistic model that solves it. We also evaluate our model on the related role-labelling task, and compare it with a standard role labeller. For both tasks, our model benefits from classbased smoothing, which allows it to make correct argument-specifi...

Sentence Processing and Linguistic Structure