The resolution of temporary syntactic ambiguity involves not only the reanalysis of syntactic structure but also the resolution of the conflict between the new correct interpretation and the initial incorrect parse. The current study investigated the contribution of domain-general conflict resolution ability as indexed by performance on an n-back task (with lures) and the online resolution of t...

The core human capacity of syntactic analysis involves a left hemisphere network involving left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (LMTG) and the anatomical connections between them. Here we use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to determine the spatio-temporal properties of syntactic computations in this network. Listeners heard spoken sentences containing a local syn...

In this paper we propose to define selectional preference and semantic similarity as information-theoretic relationships involving conceptual classes, and we demonstrate the applicability of these definitions to the resolution of syntactic ambiguity. The space of classes is defined using WordNet [8], and conceptual relationships are determined by means of statistical analysis using parsed text ...

This paper deals with the use of prosodic information in disambiguating syntactic structure, i.e. in arriving at the correct interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence. We will start out by examining closer the linguistic phenomenon of prosody, its acoustic and functional properties. It is pretty clear that prosody plays an important role in human speech understanding, however, the ex...

Telegraphic messages with numerous instances of omission pose a new challenge to parsing in that a sentence with omission causes a higher degree of ambi6uity than a sentence without omission. Misparsing reduced by omissions has a far-reaching consequence in machine translation. Namely, a misparse of the input often leads to a translation into the target language which has incoherent meaning in ...