A 3D-Tree is an efficient representation of a set of regular syntactic trees (2D-trees) that have the same tree skeleton but which may have different labels for the nodes. A node of a 3D-tree may have one or more sets of children as well as one or more parent nodes as long as the 2Dtrees represented have the same tree skeleton. A 3D-tree is therefore able to efficiently represent the type of am...

The time-course with which readers use event-specific world knowledge (thematic fit) to resolve structural ambiguity was explored through experiments and implementation of constraintbased and two-stage models. In a norming study, subjects completed fragments that ended in the ambiguous region of a reduced relative clause (The crook arrested/by/the/detective). Completion proportions up to and in...

Although there has been some speculation concerning the role played by punctuation in parsing, there has been amazingly little empirical investigation of the issue. Punctuation appears to be a widely neglected topic. For the most part, where punctuation has been included in parsing studies, investigators have simply assumed that punctuation, such as commas, can be used to effectively disambigua...

People comprehend utterances rapidly and without consc ious e f for t . Tradi t ional theories assume that sentence processing is algorithmic and that meaning is derived compositionally. The language processor is believed to generate representations of the linguistic input that are complete, detailed, and accurate. However, recent findings challenge these assumptions. Investigations of the misi...

People comprehend utterances rapidly and without conscious effort. Traditional theories assume that sentence processing is algorithmic and that meaning is derived compositionally. The language processor is believed to generate representations of the linguistic input that are complete, detailed, and accurate. However, recent findings challenge these assumptions. Investigations of the misinterpre...

Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause object/main clause subject ambiguity. The critical ...

This thesis presents NL-Soar, a detailed computational model of human sentence comprehension that accounts for a broad range of psycholinguistic phenomena. NL-Soar provides in-depth accounts of structural ambiguity resolution, garden path effects, unproblematic ambiguities, parsing breakdown on difficult embeddings, acceptable embeddings, immediacy of interpretation, and the time course of comp...

This work is an investigation into part of the human sentence parsing mechanism (HSPM). The major test of the psychological val idi ty of any model of the HSPM is that it fail on precisely those sentences that humans find to be garden paths. It is hypothesized that the HSPM consists of at least two processes. We call the first process the syntactic processor, and the second wil l be known as th...

This paper presents modifications to a standard probabilistic context-free grammar that enable a predictive parser to avoid garden pathing without resorting to any ad-hoc heuristic repair. The resulting parser is shown to apply efficiently to both newspaper text and telephone conversations with complete coverage and excellent accuracy. The distribution over trees is peaked enough to allow the p...

Experimental sentence comprehension studies have shown that superficially similar German clauses with verb-final word order elicit very different garden-path and ERP effects. We show that a computer implementation of the Unification Space parser (Vosse & Kempen, 2000) in the form of a localist-connectionist network can model the observed differences, at least qualitatively. The model embodies a...