Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers’ eyefixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated, and retrieval, which ...

A growing body of evidence in cognitive science and neuroscience points towards the existence of a deep interconnection between cognition, perception and action. According to this embodied perspective language is grounded in the sensorimotor system and language understanding is based on a mental simulation process (Jeannerod, 2007; Gallese, 2008; Barsalou, 2009). This means that during action w...

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real-world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how ...

We take “symbolic models of sentence processing” to mean approaches in which processing is characterized in terms of relatively discrete, combinatorial representations. We survey the distinct approaches: Grammar-based, automataand informationtheoretic, those involving complexity metrics and principles, cognitive architecturebased, and probabilistic models. An example is provided of each approac...

We present a series of simulations of behavioral data by casting a simple parsing model in the cognitive architecture ACT-R. We show that constraints defined in ACT-R, specifically, those relating to activation, can account for a range of facts about human sentence processing. In doing so, we argue that resource limitation in working memory is better defined as an artefact of very general const...

This paper applies the idea of a winner-take-all constraint satisfaction system like that found in Optimality Theory to human sentence parsing. Three sets of constraints, each of which is derived from a parsing theory from the current literature, are attempted. The empirical data considered here do not seem to be consistent with any of these theories. It is argued that a cumulative constraint w...

In memory-based models of human sentence processing it is assumed that the completion of a dependency between a syntactic head and its dependents is a major source of processing difficulty in non-ambiguous sentences, and that this integration cost is a function of the distance between the two elements. However, it remains open how to measure the distance between two dependent elements. While ma...

In recent years formal semantic theories based on the principle of compositionality have been criticized of not being able to explain how meaning is computed in the brain (Baggio and Hagoort 2011). For example, although neither John squeezed an orange nor John squeezed an apple contain a semantic anomaly, they are processed differently in the brain, because orange is more expected as the direct...

A variant of the non-nutritive sucking method was explored to test 2-month-old infants’ perception of whole sentences. Three consecutive high-amplitude sucks were required to trigger one sentence, and each subject was submitted to two changes in stimulation, one experimental (language change) and one control (speaker change). The results were significant, showing that the procedure is appropria...