Natural language understanding (NLU) focusing on machine reading comprehension is a branch of natural language processing (NLP). The domain of the developing NLU system covers from sentence decoding to text understanding and the automatic decoding of GP sentence belongs to the domain of NLU system. GP sentence is a special linguistic phenomenon in which processing breakdown and backtracking are...

This is a description of research in developing a natural language processing system with modular knowledge sources but strongly interactive processing. The system offers insights into a variety of linguistic phenomena and allows easy testing of a variety of hypotheses. Language interpretation takes place on a activation network which is dynamically created from input, recent context, and long-...

Dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing predict "digging-in" effects: The more committed the parser becomes to a wrong syntactic choice, the harder it is to reanalyze. Experiment 1 replicates previous grammaticality judgment studies (F. Ferreira & J. M. Henderson, 1991b, 1993), revealing a deleterious effect of lengthening the ambiguous region of a garden-path sentence. The aut...

Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on initial parsing decision. However, whether prosody functions in the same way in adult second language (L2) sentence processing is not known. In visual world eyetracking experiments, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing locally ambiguous sentences with L1 speakers (native Engli...

Previous experiments have demonstrated the impact of speech prosody on syntactic processing. The present study was designed to examine how listeners use specific acoustic properties of prosody for grammatical interpretation. We investigated the independent contributions of two acoustic properties associated with the pitch and rhythmic properties of speech; the fundamental frequency and temporal...

In human sentence processing, cognitive load can be defined many ways. This report considers a definition of cognitive load in terms of the total probability of structural options that have been disconfirmed at some point in a sentence: the surprisal of word wi given its prefix w0...i−1 on a phrase-structural language model. These loads can be efficiently calculated using a probabilistic Earley...

Language is ordered in time and an incremental processing system encounters temporary ambiguity in the middle of sentence comprehension. An optimal incremental processing system must solve two computational problems: On the one hand, it has to keep multiple possible interpretations without choosing one over the others. On the other hand, it must reject interpretations inconsistent with context....

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Speakers should be motivated to produce easy-to-understand sentences, but they must successfully say sentences that are harder to produce. Four experiments assessed how verb bias influences the mention of the optional "that" in sentence-complement structures. Without the "that", such sentences can be incorrectly interpreted as including direct objects (garden paths), and especially so after dir...