Wk 12: Sentence Processing 2 (slides 3)

Garden Path Theory

Increased processing load in temporarily ambiguous sentences often occurs at the disambiguating point.

output from lexical processor

word categories

output from syntactic parser

syntactic structures

output from thematic interpreter

sentence meaning

error signals occur between

thematic interpreter and syntactic praser

Constraint-Based Models

Parallel influence of multiple "constraints" (context, meaning, probability), parallel structure building/evaluation, and similar in spirit to TRACE model of auditory word recognition - activation, suppression…

in reversible sentences the accuracy was higher in plausible and implausible sentences when the agent and patient were

active

in NONreversible sentences the accuracy was higher in plausible and implausible sentences when the agent and patient were active BUT

passive improved

Conclusions from Experiment 1 Generalizations

Wrong thematic roles lead to non-syntactic approach (Still better than chance) and Early shallow interpretations

Surprisal is a specific value calculated from

conditional probability that can be obtained from various sources

Low probability means

high surprisal

language models are systems used to do

"predictive text" that also provide probabilities for the next word, via different algorithms based on corpora

Parsing may not always be

deep/complete.

Heuristics (rather than ________----) may guide some interpretation.

structure

We do use syntactic information to predict

upcoming words incrementally.