The human brain supports acquisition mechanisms that extract structural regularities implicitly from experience without the induction of an explicit model. It has been argued that the capacity to generalize to new input is based on the acquisition of abstract representations, which reflect underlying structural regularities in the input ensemble. In this study, we explored the outcome of this a...

First, we believe that the phrase structure used by many (if not most) linguistic theories is useful only in deriving the syntactic behavior of lexical heads (or classes of lexical heads) from more general principles(which is of course the goal of syntactic theory); once derived, the syntactic behavior can be expressed in simpler terms that can be easier to manipulate in a computational setting...

The well related tasks of evaluating the Semantic Textual Similarity and Semantic Relatedness have been under a special attention in NLP community. Many different approaches have been proposed, implemented and evaluated at different levels, such as lexical similarity, word/string/POS tags overlapping, semantic modeling (LSA, LDA), etc. However, at the level of syntactic structure, it is not cle...

Classical phrase structure tries to collapse syntactic and ordering information. However, this conception of the syntax of language is erroneous because it supposes that word order is always an immediate reflection of the syntactic hierarchy and that any deviation from this constitutes a problem, denoted by terms with negative undertones like scrambling. Modern linguistic frameworks propose a d...

: This study aims to explore the relationship between syntactic and lexical complexity and also the relationship between different aspects of lexical complexity. To this end, speech monologs of 35 Iranian high-intermediate learners of English on three different tasks (i.e. argumentation, description, and narration) were analyzed for correlations between one measure of sy...

We tackle the problem of answer type prediction, applying a transition-based neural network parser to understand the syntactic structure of a query and infer the focus word or phrase that contains the correct type. To achive this, we first come up with a framework to combine a dataset of labeled question-answer pairs and a type inventory into a dataset to learn types. Second, we fit a sigmoid p...

In Japanese, the syntactic structure of a sentence is generally represented by the relationship between phrasal units, bunsetsus in Japanese, based on a dependency grammar. In many cases, the syntactic structure of a bunsetsu is not considered in syntactic structure annotation. This paper gives the criteria and definitions of dependency relationships between words in a bunsetsu and their applic...

A longstanding question in bilingualism is whether syntactic information is shared between the two language processing systems. We used an fMRI repetition suppression paradigm to investigate syntactic priming in reading comprehension in German-English late-acquisition bilinguals. In comparison to conventional subtraction analyses in bilingual experiments, repetition suppression has the advantag...

Language comprehension can be subdivided into three processing steps: initial structure building, semantic integration, and late syntactic integration. The two syntactic processing phases are correlated with two distinct components in the event-related brain potential, namely an early left anterior negativity (ELAN) and a late centroparietal positivity (P600). Moreover, ERP findings from health...