The purposes of the present study were twofold. First, we sought to establish whether tonal symmetry produces processing fluency. Second, we sought to explore whether symmetry and chunk strength express themselves differently in fluency, as an indication of different mechanisms being involved for sub- and supra-finite state processing. Across two experiments, participants were asked to listen t...

There is large evidence that infants are able to exploit statistical cues to discover the words of their language. However, how they proceed to do so is the object of enduring debates. The prevalent position is that words are extracted from the prior computation of statistics, in particular the transitional probabilities between syllables. As an alternative, chunk-based models posit that the se...

We describe a method to use a chunker for grammar checking. Once a chunker is available the method is fully unsupervised, only unannotated text is required for training. The method is very simple, compare the output of the chunker on new texts to the output on known correct text. Rare chunk sequences that occur in the new texts are reported as suspected errors. By automatically modifying the ch...

This is to report the results of approaching the problem of NP chunking using Inductive Logic Programming techniques. The problem, as de-ned in (Ramshaw and Marcus, 1995), is the machine learning of rules that recognise non-recursive, base NPs in text annotated with part-of-speech tags, by tagging each word as beingìnside' oròutside' an NP. (Consecutive NPs are appropriately treated.) The same ...

We investigate the feasibility of machine learning in automatic detection of disfluencies in a large syntactically annotated corpus of spontaneous spoken Dutch. We define disfluencies as chunks that do not fit under the syntactic tree of a sentence (including fragmented words, laughter, self-corrections, repetitions, abandoned constituents, hesitations and filled pauses). We use a memory-based ...

There is growing evidence that, faced with a complex environment, participants subdivide the incoming information into small perceptual units, called chunks. Although statistical properties have been identified as playing a key role in chunking, we wanted to determine whether perceptual (repetitions) and positional (initial units) features might provide immediate guidance for the parsing of inf...

Task complexity is critical in cognitive efficiency and fluid intelligence. To examine functional limits in task complexity, we examine the phenomenon of goal neglect, where participants with low fluid intelligence fail to follow task rules that they otherwise understand. Though neglect is known to increase with task complexity, here we show that - in contrast to previous accounts - the critica...

We present a linguistically-motivated sub-sentential alignment system that extends the intersected IBM Model 4 word alignments. The alignment system is chunk-driven and requires only shallow linguistic processing tools for the source and the target languages, i.e. part-ofspeech taggers and chunkers. We conceive the sub-sentential aligner as a cascaded model consisting of two phases. In the firs...