We report three eye-movement experiments that investigated whether alternative syntactic analyses compete during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Previous research (Traxler, Pickering, & Clifton, 1998; Van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2001) has shown that globally ambiguous sentences are easier to process than disambiguated sentences, suggesting that competition does not explain processing diff...

It is well-known that, across languages, so-called “given” information (as opposed to “new” information) systematically correlates with lack of phonetic prominence, or deaccentuation (Halliday 1967, Taglicht 1982, Ladd 1996, Selkirk 1995, Schwarzschild 1999, among many others). The primary goal of this paper is to provide a minimalist syntactic account for a sub-case of this phenomenon, namely ...

Taxonomies are the backbone of many structured, semantic knowledge resources. Recent works for extracting taxonomic relations from text focused on collecting lexical-syntactic patterns to extract the taxonomic relations by matching the patterns to text. These approaches, however, often show low coverage due to the lack of contextual analysis across sentences. To address this issue, we propose a...

This study provides evidence for implicit learning in syntactic comprehension. By reanalyzing data from a syntactic priming experiment (Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008), we find that the error signal associated with a syntactic prime influences comprehenders' subsequent syntactic expectations. This follows directly from error-based implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming, but it is unexpec...

We present a model for sentence compression that uses a discriminative largemargin learning framework coupled with a novel feature set defined on compressed bigrams as well as deep syntactic representations provided by auxiliary dependency and phrase-structure parsers. The parsers are trained out-of-domain and contain a significant amount of noise. We argue that the discriminative nature of the...