Negation is a universal phenomenon in human communication. All natural languages have negation, yet it seems to be absent in animal communication systems (S Altmann, 1967). We use negation frequently for a wide range of purposes, including rejection, denial and talking about non-existence. According to the Oxford English Corpus, “not” is the 13 most frequently used word in the English language....

The limited capacity of working memory is intrinsic to human sentence processing, and therefore must be addressed by any theory of human sentence processing. This paper gives a theory of garden-path effects and processing overload that is based on simple assumptions about human short term memory capacity.

The emphasis in the connectionist sentence-processing literature on distributed representation and emergence of grammar from such systems seems to have prevented connectionists and symbolists alike from recognizing the often close relations between their respective systems. This paper argues that simply recurrent network (SRN) models proposed by Jordan (1990) and Elman (1990) are more directly ...

Patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) have sentence comprehension difficulty. We examined the hypothesis that both grammatical and resource factors contribute to their impaired sentence comprehension with a traditional, off-line sentence comprehension task, and an on-line sentence processing procedure that minimizes task-related resources. This was investigated in subgroups of FTD patient...

We suggest that the theory of dynamical systems provides a revealing general framework for modeling the representations and mechanism underlying syntactic processing. We show how a particular dynamical model, the Visitation Set Gravitation model of Tabor, Juliano, and Tanenhaus (1997), develops syntactic representations and models a set of contingent frequency effects in parsing that are proble...

Anticipation is an essential ability for the human cognitive system to survive in its surrounding environment. The present article will review previous research on anticipatory processes in sentence processing (comprehension). I start by pointing out past research carried out with inadequate methods, then move on to reviewing recent research with relatively new, more appropriate methods, specif...

My PhD thesis concerns a recurrent neural network model which will be trained to comprehend and produce sentences drawn from a fairly large subset of English grammar. In order to validate and better understand the model, its performance will be compared to that of humans on a wide range of sentence processing tests. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize a variety of reliable empirical fin...

BACKGROUND Sentence comprehension requires linguistic processing as well as cognitive resources such as working memory (WM) and information-processing speed (IPS). The authors hypothesize that sentence comprehension difficulty in patients with mild PD is due to degradation of the large-scale neural network that supports cognitive resources during sentence processing. OBJECTIVE To understand t...

Three areas of the left hemisphere play different roles in sentence comprehension. An area of posterior middle and superior temporal gyrus shows activation correlated with the structural complexity of a sentence, suggesting that this area supports processing of sentence structure. The lateral anterior temporal gyrus is more activated bilaterally by all sentence conditions than by word lists; th...