In two visual word eye tracking studies, we investigated the influence of prosody and case marking on children’s and adults’ thematic role assignment. We assigned an SVO/ OVS-biasing (vs. neutral) prosodic contour to unambiguously case marked German subject-verb-object (SVO) and object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences respectively. Scenes depicted ambiguous action events (e.g., donkey-paints->eleph...

This study attempts to specify the contribution of two subregions of Broca's area during syntactic and semantic processing of sentences by examining brain activation in a grammaticality judgment task. The processing of two types of ungrammatical sentences was examined. One type leaves the thematic interpretation generally unaffected, by violating the noun-verb agreement in number, while the oth...

The end user often needs to define extremely complex interpretation tasks and to require the analysis results to be quantitatively proven for each pixel without the test data. To this end, this paper extends the ideas underlying the modelbased unsupervised classification method previously proposed by us (Koltunov and Ben-Dor 2001). Consistently with that method, the quality of assigning a pixel...

This special research area combines visualization and interpretation of sensor data by exploring the central subjects models", op-timization", hierarchies", and data fusion". This article describes the structural and thematic organization of the research project and illustrates rst results of one subbproject as an example.

Synonymy is a pivot relation in NLP but remains problematic. Putting forward, we introduce the notion of relative synonymy, to circumvent some diÆculties among which possible polysemy and contextual interpretation. In the framework of conceptual vectors, it is then possible to formalize test functions for synonymy and to experiment their use in thematic analysis that will help text classi cation.

Recent ERP findings challenge the widespread assumption that syntactic and semantic processes are tightly coupled. Syntactically well-formed sentences that are semantically anomalous due to thematic mismatches elicit a P600, the component standardly associated with syntactic anomaly. This 'thematic P600' effect has been attributed to detection of semantically plausible thematic relations that c...

OBJECTIVES This study was designed to investigate interpretation bias in people with dependent personality traits. METHOD Eight Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) cards were administered to participants (N=56) who scored high or low on DSM-III-R dependent personality pathology. Two independent judges rated the TAT stories using a rating list based on the cognitive model of the dependent and par...

In a story completion study involving transfer-of-possession passages (John handed a book to Bob. He _____), Stevenson et al. (1994) identified a pronoun interpretation preference that is compatible with two possible explanations: a superficial thematic role bias for Goals over Sources, and a deeper event structure bias toward focusing on the end state of such events. To distinguish these hypot...