Abstract Bringing together lines of research from sentence processing and lexical access, this empirical study investigates the interplay between (grammatical gender) syntactic (word order) cross-linguistic overlap in L2 German. Eighty-six L1 Spanish-L2 German thirty-six monolingual adults completed a self-paced reading task with noun phrases (NPs) manipulated by L1-L2 gender congruency (congru...

A meaningful noun-verb word-pair in a sentence is called a noun-verb event-frame (NVFE). Previously, we have developed an NVEF word-pair identifier to demonstrate that NVEF knowledge can be used effectively to resolve the Chinese word-sense disambiguation (WSD) problem (with 93.7% accuracy) and the Chinese syllable-to-word (STW) conversion problem (with 99.66% accuracy) on the NVEF related port...

The present investigation demonstrates that incremental sentence processing is guided by principles of minimal structure building. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to a local number mismatch between an auxiliary and a subsequent noun phrase revealed that the subject preference, a strategy known to be very robust during processing, can be overridden when information about a verb's valency (i.e., ...

Prepositional Phrase is the key issue in structural ambiguity. Recently, researches in corpora provide the lexical cue of prepositions with other words and the information could be used to partly resolve ambiguity resulted from prepositional phrases. Two possible attachments are considered in the literature: either noun attachment or verb attachment. In this paper, we consider the problem from ...

Noun phrases consisting of a sequence of nouns (sometimes referred to as nominal compounds) pose considerable difficulty for language analyzers but are common in many technical domains. The problems are compounded when some of the nouns in the sequence are ambiguously also verbs. The phrasal approach to language analysis, as implemented in PHRAN (PHRasal ANalyzer), has been extended to handle t...

This paper tests the validity of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) (Fodor 1998, 2002) based on production and perception experiments on Korean data. IPH states that attachment of a relative clause (RC) in a sentence with a complex noun phrase is influenced by a default prosodic contour of the structure projected in silent reading. It predicts that speakers of a language who prefer high atta...

In many types of technical texts, meaning is embedded in noun compounds. A language understanding program needs to be able to interpret these in order to ascertain sentence meaning. We explore the possibility of using the top levels of an existing lexical hierarchy for the purpose of placing words from a noun compound into categories, and then using this category membership to determine the rel...

Words carry considerable information, but much of that information is not relevant in context. Research has shown that readers selectively activate and remember relevant information associated with words in different contexts, but it is not known when in processing this selection occurs. This experiment investigated whether context can change which properties are initially retrieved, using a sp...