Recent research has indicated that a verb’s preferential subcategorization frame plays a fundamental role in guiding the choice of the type of complement that follows a verb. For example, sentences with a sentential complement-biased verb, such as “admitted”, will cause less processing difficulties when it is followed by a sentential complement than when it is followed by a direct object. Such ...

This is ct description of research in developing ct natural language processing system with modular knowledge sources but strongly interactive processing. The system offers insights into o variety of linguistic phenomeno and allows easy testing of a variety of hypotheses. Language interpretotion takes place on ct activation network which is dynamically created from input, recent context, ond lo...

The present study aimed at highlighting the possible effects of age, proficiency level, and the structural composition of Garden-Path (GP) sentences on EFL learners' comprehension. 80 Iranian EFL learners were recruited from the initial pool of 114 participants based on the results of an English proficiency test; 40 advanced, and 40 intermediate learners were selected. Moreover, two age...

In reading, a comma in the wrong place can cause more severe misunderstandings than the lack of a required comma. Here, we used ERPs to demonstrate that a similar effect holds for prosodic boundaries in spoken language. Participants judged the acceptability of temporarily ambiguous English "garden path" sentences whose prosodic boundaries were either in line or in conflict with the actual synta...

Diacritics convey vowel sounds in Arabic, allowing accurate word pronunciation. Mostly, modern Arabic is printed nondiacritized. Otherwise, diacritics appear either only on homographic words when not disambiguated by surrounding text or on all words as in religious or educational texts. In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined sentence processing in the absence of diacritics and when diacriti...

We describe a Deterministic Dependency Parser for Sanskrit. The parse is developed following a Depth First traversal of a graph whose nodes represent morphological analyses of the words in a sentence. During the traversal, relations at each node are checked for local compatibility, and finally for each full path, the relations on the path are checked for global compatibility. Stacking of interm...

Recent psycholinguistics research suggests that the executive function (EF) skill known as conflict resolution - the ability to adjust behavior in the service of resolving among incompatible representations - is important for several language processing tasks such as lexical and syntactic ambiguity resolution, verbal fluency, and common-ground assessment. Here, we discuss work showing that vari...

Accounts of individual differences in online language processing ability often focus on the explanatory utility of verbal working memory, as measured by reading span tasks. Although variability in reading span task performance likely reflects individual differences in multiple underlying traits, skills, and processes, accumulating evidence suggests that reading span scores also reflect variabil...

In this paper we present a parser which al lows to make explicit the interconnections between syntax and semantics, to analyze the sentences in a quasi-deterministic fashion and, in many cases, to identify the roles of the various constituents even if the sentance is ill-formed. The main fea ture of the approach on which the parser is based consists in a two-level representation of the sy_n tac...

The present study compares the processing of unambiguous restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses (RCs) within both a null context and a supportive discourse using a self-paced reading methodology. Individuals read restrictive RCs more slowly than non-restrictive RCs in a null context, but processed restrictive RCs faster than non-restrictive RCs in supportive context, resulting in an i...