A garden-path sentence has temporary ambiguity that a reader or listener need to resolve. Prosody is well-known to have effects on sentence comprehension so it is expected that it will affect the interpretation of garden-path sentences. However, in an auditory comprehension test with natural speech, the garden-path effect may be unclear because a listener can typically resolve the ambiguity and...

This thesis presents a model of incremental natural language understanding based on the grammatical formalism known as Combinatory Categorial Grammar. The model constitutes an integrated system involving a cyclical process of parsing, semantic adjudication and filtering. The motivating data for the model are the well-known observations about garden path effects in human sentence processing, and...

We present a cognitive process model of human sentence comprehension based on generalized left-corner parsing. A search heuristic based upon previouslyparsed corpora derives garden path effects, garden path paradoxes, and the local coherence effect.

This paper presents a semantic model for Chinese garden-path sentences. Based on the Sentence Degeneration model of HNC theory, a garden-path can arise from two types of ambiguities: SD type ambiguity and NP allocated ambiguity. This paper provides an approach to process garden-paths, in which ambiguity detection and analysis take the place of revision. The performance of the approach is evalua...

Garden path sentences are those in which an ambiguity in the structure biases the reader’s interpretation so strongly toward a wrong interpretation that when a disambiguating word is encountered, the meaning is very tough to recover, if at all possible. In this project, we study sentences that are not traditionally garden path, but that are interpreted as garden path because the initial input, ...

2720 0079 thor’ repo mou Brian Tane Mike colle Ad Sedi Box (401 that the presence of the focus operator only resulted in diminished garden path effects for reduced relative clauses, controlling for definiteness of the noun phrase. Experiment 2 manipulated discourse contexts and showed that the presence of an explicit contrast set in the context sentence preceding a target sentence with focus in...

Language input is highly variable; phonological, lexical, and syntactic features vary systematically across different speakers, geographic regions, and social contexts. Previous evidence shows that language users are sensitive to these contextual changes and that they can rapidly adapt to local regularities. For example, listeners quickly adjust to accented speech, facilitating comprehension. I...

While natural speech prosody facilitates sentence processing, unnatural or misleading prosody decreases speed and accuracy in resolving syntactic ambiguities. This study investigated how, and to what extent, fundamental frequency (F0) and the temporal envelope (E) contribute to processing gardenpath sentences that provide misleading grammatical interpretations. Signal processing methods degrade...

Research on the cognitive science of sentence processing has been driven heavily by the study of resolution of syntactic ambiguity in Garden Path sentences. Recent work has shown that apart from syntax, semantics is another essential component that affects the analysis of sentences. In this study, we analyze the role of semantic plausibility in resolution of syntactically ambiguous Garden Path ...

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.