It has previously been assumed in the psycholinguistic literature that finite-state models of language are crucially limited in their explanatory power by the locality of the probability distribution and the narrow scope of information used by the model. We show that a simple computational model (a bigram part-of-speech tagger based on the design used by Corley and Crocker (2000)) makes correct...

One of the core aspects of human sentence processing is the ability to detect errors and to recover from erroneous analysis through revision of ambiguous sentences and repair of ungrammatical sentences. In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to help identify the nature of these processes by directly comparing ERPs to complex ambiguous sentence structures with and without ...

1 Introduction One of the central controversies in sentence processing concerns the role of structural factors. The touchstone for the two main competing schools of thought, structure-based and constraint-based, are garden-path sentences, such as The horse raced past the barn fell, discussed in sentence processing literature since at least Bever (1970), and in general the resolution of ambiguit...

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong disambiguating evidence at the end of the sentence. These fi...

When faced with the noun phrase (NP) versus sentence (S) coordination ambiguity as in, for example, The thief shot the jeweller and the cop ..., readers prefer the reading with NP-coordination (e.g., "The thief shot the jeweller and the cop yesterday") over one with two conjoined sentences (e.g., "The thief shot the jeweller and the cop panicked"). A corpus study is presented showing that NP-co...

This article examines cognitive process models of human sentence comprehension based on the idea of informed search. These models are rational in the sense that they strive to find a good syntactic analysis quickly. Informed search derives a new account of garden pathing that handles traditional counterexamples. It supports a symbolic explanation for local coherence as well as an algorithmic ac...

We investigated whether readers use verb information to aid in their initial parsing of temporarily ambiguous sentences. In the first experiment, subjects' eye movements were recorded. In the second and third experiments, subjects read sentences by using a noncumulative and cumulative word-by-word self-paced paradigm, respectively. The results of the first two experiments supported Frazier and ...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects read sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. Words which were inconsistent with the "preferred" sentence structure elicited a brain potential (P600) quite distinct from the potential previously observed following contextually inappropriate words (N400). Furthermore, final words in sentences typically...