We outline four ways in which uncertainty might affect comprehension difficulty in human sentence processing. These four hypotheses motivate a self-paced reading experiment, in which we used verb subcategorization distributions to manipulate the uncertainty over the next step in the syntactic derivation (single step entropy) and the surprisal of the verb’s complement. We additionally estimate w...

The present study was designed to further examine the inhibitory processes of spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones during sentence processing. In this study, we employed the negative priming paradigm in a cross-modal naming experiment. In the experiment, all the native Cantonese listeners were asked to name aloud a visual probe as quick and accurate as they could after hearing a senten...

We propose an effective approach to automatically identify predicate heads in Chinese sentences based on statistical pre-processing and rule-based post-processing. In the preprocessing stage, the maximal noun phrases in a sentence are recognized and replaced by “NP” labels to simplify the sentence structure. Then a CRF model is trained to recognize the predicate heads of this simplified sentenc...

Clearly some kind of constrained parsing comes into play in human sentence processing. The exact nature of this parsing mechanism has been hard to pin down, especially when facts about CECs from different languages are taken into consideration. In response to this issue of providing a crosslinguistically robust account of CEC processing, several experimental studies have targetted Dutch, German...

This target article discusses the verbal working memory system used in sentence comprehension. We review the concept of working memory as a short-duration system in which small amounts of information are simultaneously stored and manipulated in the service of accomplishing a task. We summarize the argument that syntactic processing in sentence comprehension requires such a storage and computati...

A total of 50 elderly individuals and 48 college students were tested on several measures of processing speed and of working memory capacity. Language processing was tested with an on-line measure of sentence processing efficiency, an end-of-sentence acceptability judgement task, and a paragraph comprehension test. Elderly individuals performed more poorly than college students on the speed of ...

The limited capacity of working memory is intrinsic to human sentence processing, and therefore must be addressed by any theory of human sentence processing. I assume that the amount of short term memory that is necessary at any stage in the parsing process is determined by the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the structure(s) that have been built up to that point in the parse. A...

This paper provides evidence for Genzel and Charniak’s (2002) entropy rate principle, which predicts that the entropy of a sentence increases with its position in the text. We show that this principle holds for individual sentences (not just for averages), but we also find that the entropy rate effect is partly an artifact of sentence length, which also correlates with sentence position. Second...

This volume contains 15 papers from a special session held at the 11th CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (1998). There are three thematically arranged sections: proposals from theoretical linguistics, the lexicon– syntax relationship as regards processing, and the content of lexical entries. The first chapter summarizes the papers and discusses the broader issues raised in the book. (The full...

Natural language understanding (NLU) focusing on machine reading comprehension is a branch of natural language processing (NLP). The domain of the developing NLU system covers from sentence decoding to text understanding and the automatic decoding of GP sentence belongs to the domain of NLU system. GP sentence is a special linguistic phenomenon in which processing breakdown and backtracking are...