We present a detailed process theory of the moment-by-moment working-memory retrievals and associated control structure that subserve sentence comprehension. The theory is derived from the application of independently motivated principles of memory and cognitive skill to the specialized task of sentence parsing. The resulting theory construes sentence processing as a series of skilled associati...

In a self-paced reading experiment, we investigated the processing of sluicing constructions ("sluices") whose antecedent contained a known garden-path structure in German. Results showed decreased processing times for sluices with garden-path antecedents as well as a disadvantage for antecedents with non-canonical word order downstream from the ellipsis site. A post-hoc analysis showed the gar...

The resolution of local syntactic ambiguity by the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism is a topic which has provoked considerable interest in recent years. At issue is whether such ambiguities are resolved on the basis of syntactic information alone (cf. Minimal Attachment Frazier, 1979), or whether they are resolved on some other basis. Crain & Steedman (1982) suggest that the resolution proce...

Presupposition is a pervasive feature of human language. It involves many interesting interactions between the utterances of a discourse and the context of the discourse. In this paper we focus on issues of logical form connected with the interaction of presupposition and discourse context, and illustrate our theory with some implementational work using the active logic framework. After reviewi...

Readers misinterpret garden-path sentences such as While the man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful ran into the woods as meaning The man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful and the deer ran into the woods. The “Goodenough” processing account proposes that misinterpretation occurs when readers are satisfied with the interpretation derived from the first-pass parse, and thus do ...

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden pat...

This paper addresses the semantics of the present form (known as the -ru form) of activity verbs in Japanese and examines the effect of these verbs in contrast to that of the inflected form (the -ta form). Garden-path sentences involving an ambiguity between a simple sentential reading and a relative clause reading generally show a preference for the former reading; when the preferred reading p...

Computational linguistics can provide an effective perspective to explain the partial ambiguity during machine translation. The structure of V+Pron+CP/NP has the ambiguous potential to bring Garden Path effect. If Tell+Pron+NP structure has considerable higher observed frequencies than Tell+Pron+CP structure, the former is regarded as the preferred structure and has much lower confusion quotien...