Sentence processing takes place in real-time. Previous words in the sentence can influence the processing of the current word in the timescale of hundreds of milliseconds. Recent neurophysiological studies in humans suggest that the fronto-striatal system (frontal cortex, and striatum--the major input locus of the basal ganglia) plays a crucial role in this process. The current research provide...

People with agrammatic aphasia often experience greater difficulty comprehending passive compared to active sentences. The Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH; Grodzinsky, 2000) proposes that aphasic individuals cannot generate accurate syntactic representations of passive sentences and, hence, use an agent-first processing strategy which leads to at-chance performance. We tested this claim using th...

Fluent readers process text at a number of levels; at the word, the sentence, the conceptual and the topic levels (Munro & Munro, 1991, 1994). The outputs from each process are retained for varying durations in short-term working memory. Depending in part on their purposes for reading at any time, readers perceive the outputs of some levels to be more useful than those at other levels. As they ...

Language identification is an important pre-processing step for any Natural Language Processing task. Kannada Language is an Indian Language and lot of research is being carried out on Kannada Language Processing. Major parts of online documents like websites are combination of Kannada and English Sentences. Language Identification is a preprocessing step for NLP tasks like POS tagging, Sentenc...

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize cortical activation associated with sentence processing, thereby elucidating where in the brain auditory and visual inputs of words converge during sentence comprehension. Within one scanning session, subjects performed three types of tasks with different linguistic components from perception to sentence comprehension: nonword...

This paper addresses the following main question: How do the structural constraints of Binding Theory interact with on-line sentence processing? There have been two types of answers to this question hypothesized in the literature: (1) the Initial Filter hypothesis, which claims that Binding Theory constrains the sentence processing system from the earliest moments of reference resolution (Nicol...

There is now considerable evidence that human sentence processing is expectation based: As people read a sentence, they use their statistical experience with their language to generate predictions about upcoming syntactic structure. This study examines how sentence processing is affected by readers’ uncertainty in their expectations about upcoming structure. In a self-paced reading study, we ma...

How do people transform the surface structure of a sentence into the sentence’s intended meaning? Word order is an important cue used by people in sentence comprehension (Bates et al., 1982; Ferreira, 2003). Another important cue is the meaning of individual words (i.e. nouns and verbs) which we refer to as “content words”. In these and many approaches in sentence processing studies, the focus ...

This thesis presents a computational model of working memory load in human sentence processing that attempts to explain a number of well-established linguistic performance effects that are associated with processing difficulty of certain syntactic structures. The computational model presented here is based on recent assumptions of working memory in computational cognitive modeling. In particula...