Parsing is a process of building structure onto a sentence or other string of characters so that the meaning of the sentence or string can be derived. Consider a simple English sentence: ”the boy hit the ball.” Thinking back to elementary school English class, the sentence can be broken into parts of speech as per Figure 1: an article followed by a noun, then a verb, then an article, then a nou...

Throughout the development of syntactic theory, it has been widely assumed that sentence structures are represented as a certain type of graph, called a tree. On the basis of a variety of diagnostics, the words in a sentence have been taken to clump together to form hierarchically organized subgroupings, called constituents. Thus, the sentence every child ate some cabbage is assumed to have the...

We present a neural architecture of sentence representation. Words are represented with neural cell assemblies. Relations between words are represented with ‘structure’ assemblies. Word and structure assemblies are bound temporarily to form a sentence representation. We show how multiple sentences can be represented simultaneously, and we simulate how specific information can be retrieved from ...

In 3 experiments, we investigated whether intonational phrase structure can be primed. In all experiments, participants listened to sentences in which the presence and location of intonational phrase boundaries were manipulated such that the recording included either no intonational phrase boundaries, a boundary in a structurally dispreferred location, a boundary in a preferred location, or bou...

In this paper we investigate the influence of two information structure (IS) related aspects on the choice of voice form and sentence structure by Tagalog speakers. The first is the information status of argument referents. Tagalog is a multiple voice language, so almost every semantic argument in a sentence can be turned into the privileged syntactic argument (or subject) and be rendered salie...

Some physical structures are true. For example, if I were to utter a token of the type ‘Grass is green’, the structure I would thereby bring into existence would be true ... How are the semantic properties of the sentence related to the non-semantic properties of the sentence? Where, if anywhere, are the semantic properties of truth, content and reference to be found in the non-semantic, physic...

This thesis presents a computational model of working memory load in human sentence processing that attempts to explain a number of well-established linguistic performance effects that are associated with processing difficulty of certain syntactic structures. The computational model presented here is based on recent assumptions of working memory in computational cognitive modeling. In particula...