The Informative Boundary Hypothesis (IBH: [4]) claims that a prosodic boundary is interpreted relative to preceding boundaries. This study tests predictions of the IBH with Korean learners of English (L2ers) and English native speakers (L1ers) in a prosody experiment on the resolution of an Early vs. Late Closure ambiguity in spoken English sentences. A control experiment assessed and controlle...

Interlocutors often omit important words during conversation, which can lead to miscommunication during ambiguous scenarios (Rayner, Carlson, & Frasyer, 1983). Haywood, Pickering and Branigan (2004) show that under ambiguous situations, listeners are highly sensitive to syntactic primes. The studies reported here evaluated the effects of linguistic and nonlinguistic cues to ambiguity. Experimen...

This paper addresses the issue of word-sense ambiguity in extraction from machine-readable resources for the construction of large-scale knowledge sources. We describe two experiments: one which took word-sense distinctions into account, resulting in 97.9% accuracy for semantic classiication of verbs based on (Levin, 1993); and one which ignored word-sense distinctions, resulting in 6.3% accura...

The application of the Meaning ⇔ Text Theory to Spanish parsing is presented. This formalism is based on dependency grammars. The combinatorial dictionary of this method is employed for the syntactic analysis; it consists of patterns for words, mainly verbs, where all its valences and the way they are realized are described. In this method, no fixed word order in the sentence is considered so i...

This study investigates the effect of pitch range reset in Korean listeners’ processing of syntactically ambiguous participle structures. Unlike Japanese and English,in Korean, the downtrend or the reset of pitch range does not consistently differentiate Accentual Phrases (AP), a lower level of phrasing, from Intonational Phrases (IP), a higher level of phrasing. Therefore, we explore Korean li...

Research Issues for the Next Generation Spoken Dialogue Systems p. 1 Data-Driven Analysis of Speech p. 10 Towards a Road Map for Machine Translation Research p. 19 The Prague Dependency Treebank: Crossing the Sentence Boundary p. 20 Text Tiered Tagging and Combined Language Models Classifiers p. 28 Syntactic Tagging p. 34 Information, Language, Corpus and Linguistics p. 39 Prague Dependency Tre...

When we read or listen to language, we are faced with the challenge of inferring intended messages from noisy input. This challenge is exacerbated by considerable variability between and within speakers. Focusing on syntactic processing (parsing), we test the hypothesis that language comprehenders rapidly adapt to the syntactic statistics of novel linguistic environments (e.g., speakers or genr...

Prosodic patterns provide important cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity, and might be used to improve the accuracy of automatic speech understanding. With this goal, we propose a method of scoring syntactic parses in terms of observed prosodic cues, which can be used in ranking sentence hypotheses and associated parses. Speciically, the score is the probability of acoustic features of a hypo...

Many theories have been proposed to explain difficulty with center embedded constructions, most attributing the problem to some kind of limited-capacity short-term memory. However, these theories have developed for the most part independently of more traditional memory research, which has focused on uncovering general principles such as chunking and interference. This article attempts to gain s...