In a recent series of publications (Traxler et al. J Mem Lang 39:558-592, 1998; Van Gompel et al. J Mem Lang 52:284-307, 2005; see also Van Gompel et al. (In: Kennedy, et al.(eds) Reading as a perceptual process, Oxford, Elsevier pp 621-648, 2000); Van Gompel et al. J Mem Lang 45:225-258, 2001) eye tracking data are reported showing that globally ambiguous (GA) sentences are read faster than lo...

What do language users know about particular utterances, and how do they compute this knowledge? Consider the English sentence Kate was seen by Mary. English speakers are able to determine, among other things, that Mary is the underlying subject of the sentence (that is, she is the person who did the seeing); that the thing that she saw was Kate; that the utterance is in the passive voice, and ...

Models of the human syntactic parsing mechanism can be classified according to the ways in which they operate upon ambiguous input. Each mode of operation carries particular requirements concerning such basic computational characteristics of the parser as i ts storage capacities and the scheduling of i ts processes, and so specifying which mode is actually embodied in human parsing is a useful ...

In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a cons...

The paper focuses on the issues of establishing semantic content of syntactic structures via the contrastive study of the English and Russian language systems and parallel texts analysis for the tasks of machine translation. Particular attention is given to consideration of syntactic polysemy and ambiguity, and the mechanisms of polysemous structures presentation are proposed. The decisions are...

This study investigated how acoustic cues signal the different syntactic structures of ambiguous sentences in language production. Acoustic cues such as intensity, f0, pause and duration vary according to different syntactic boundaries. Intensity of post-boundary syllable, f0 reset range of syllables around the corresponding target boundary, pause, and final lengthening of preboundary syllable ...

Statistical approaches to natural language processing generally obtain the parameters by using the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE ) method. The MLE approaches, however, may fail to achieve good performance in difficult tasks, because the discrimination and robustness issues are not taken into consideration in the estimation processes. Motivated by that concern, a discriminationand robustnes...

Although previous research has shown that listeners can use prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguities in spoken sentences, it is not clear whether naive, untrained speakers in experimental situations ordinarily produce the prosodic cues necessary for disambiguating such sentences. In a series of experiments, the authors found that neither professional nor untrained speakers consistently produced...

The paper reports on work in progress to develop a tag set for Hungarian. The rich morphological structure of the language makes tagging feasible only after a full-scale morphological analysis, which results in a magnitude of patterns that do not easily translate into a corpus tag set of manageable size. The paper analyses the extent and types of morpho-syntactic ambiguity found in a 21m word s...