What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with l
What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with l
This addition to the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition series presents a comprehensive review of the latest research findings on sentence processing in second language acquisition. The
This addition to the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition series presents a comprehensive review of the latest research findings on sentence processing in second language acquisition. The
Researchers in the fields of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and neuro-science have long been interested in the impact of the development of a universal theory of how humans process langua
Top researchers in prosody and psycholinguistics present their research and their views on the role of prosody in processing speech and also its role in reading. The volume characterizes the state of
Until recently, much research in language comprehension operated under the assumption that comprehenders initially identified the syntactic structure of sentences they were hearing or reading without
How could the kinds of grammars that linguists write actually be used in models of perceptual processing? This book relates grammars to cognitive architecture. It shows how incremental parsing works,
What do we choose to begin a sentence? How do we highlight the most important information in a sentence? This book argues that language systems determine language use to a greater extent than is gener
Sentence comprehension - the way we process and understand spoken and written language - is a central and important area of research within psycholinguistics. This book explores the contribution of computational linguistics to the field, showing how computational models of sentence processing can help scientists in their investigation of human cognitive processes. It presents the leading computational model of retrieval processes in sentence processing, the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based retrieval mode, and develops a principled methodology for parameter estimation and model comparison/evaluation using benchmark data, to enable researchers to test their own models of retrieval against the present model. It also provides readers with an overview of the last 20 years of research on the topic of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension, along with source code that allows researchers to extend the model and carry out new research. Comprehensive in its scope, this book is essential readi
A primary problem in the area of natural language processing has been that of semantic analysis. This book aims to look at the semantics of natural languages in context. It presents an approach to the computational processing of English text that combines current theories of knowledge representation and reasoning in Artificial Intelligence with the latest linguistic views of lexical semantics. This results in distinct advantages for relating the semantic analysis of a sentence to its context. A key feature is the clear separation of the lexical entries that represent the domain-specific linguistic information from the semantic interpreter that performs the analysis. The criteria for defining the lexical entries are firmly grounded in current linguistic theories, facilitating integration with existing parsers. This approach has been implemented and tested in Prolog on a domain for physics word problems and full details of the algorithms and code are presented. Semantic Processing for Fi
It is now well established that phonological -- and orthographic -- codes play a crucial role in the recognition of isolated words and in understanding the sequences of words that comprise a sentence.
The cross-linguistic aspect of language processing is becoming a central question in psycholinguistic research: if the goal of psycholinguists is to give a model of the human sentence processor, an
What biological factors make human communication possible? How do we process and understand language? How does brain damage affect these mechanisms, and what can this tell us about how language is organized in the brain? The field of neurolinguistics seeks to answer these questions, which are crucial to linguistics, psychology and speech pathology alike. This textbook, first published in 2007, introduces the central topics in neurolinguistics: speech recognition, word and sentence structure, meaning, and discourse - in both 'normal' speakers and those with language disorders. It moves on to provide a balanced discussion of key areas of debate such as modularity and the 'language areas' of the brain, 'connectionist' versus 'symbolic' modelling of language processing, and the nature of linguistic and mental representations. Making accessible over half a century of scientific and linguistic research, and containing extensive study questions, it will be welcomed by all those interested in
This book provides students and researchers of bilingualism with the most recent methodological and theoretical advances on how bilinguals resolve ambiguous information across languages. With reports on the latest findings from the behavioral and neuropsychological fields, the authors survey the latest research into bilingual language-system modelling and bilingual lexical ambiguity processing. Each chapter looks at bilingual ambiguity resolution both at the word and sentence levels, explaining how bilinguals ultimately comprehend ambiguous information arising from languages they already know. This volume not only explores enduring theoretical questions in bilingual research, such as bilingual representation and language processing, but also evaluates the extent to which the existing bilingual models can satisfactorily account for the most recent research findings.
This book examines the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension, and argues for a distinct processing component which is devoted to the recovery of syntactic structure and which utilizes the contrasting types of information found within a Government-Binding grammar. Paul Gorrell contrasts the primary relations (dominance and precedence) and secondary relations (case assignment, theta-role assignment, etc.) in a phrase-structure tree, and shows how this computational distinction of information types is reflected in the internal structure of the parser, which consists of two sub-components: a structure builder (responsible for creating nodes in a tree and positing primary relations between them), and a structure interpreter (responsible for analysing the tree in terms of secondary relations). This model can also predict garden-path phenomena in the processing of verb-final clauses.
Computational semantics is the art and science of computing meaning in natural language. The meaning of a sentence is derived from the meanings of the individual words in it, and this process can be made so precise that it can be implemented on a computer. Designed for students of linguistics, computer science, logic and philosophy, this comprehensive text shows how to compute meaning using the functional programming language Haskell. It deals with both denotational meaning (where meaning comes from knowing the conditions of truth in situations), and operational meaning (where meaning is an instruction for performing cognitive action). Including a discussion of recent developments in logic, it will be invaluable to linguistics students wanting to apply logic to their studies, logic students wishing to learn how their subject can be applied to linguistics, and functional programmers interested in natural language processing as a new application area.
Computational semantics is the art and science of computing meaning in natural language. The meaning of a sentence is derived from the meanings of the individual words in it, and this process can be made so precise that it can be implemented on a computer. Designed for students of linguistics, computer science, logic and philosophy, this comprehensive text shows how to compute meaning using the functional programming language Haskell. It deals with both denotational meaning (where meaning comes from knowing the conditions of truth in situations), and operational meaning (where meaning is an instruction for performing cognitive action). Including a discussion of recent developments in logic, it will be invaluable to linguistics students wanting to apply logic to their studies, logic students wishing to learn how their subject can be applied to linguistics, and functional programmers interested in natural language processing as a new application area.
This book is an advanced introduction to semantics that presents this crucial component of human language through the lens of the 'Meaning-Text' theory - an approach that treats linguistic knowledge as a huge inventory of correspondences between thought and speech. Formally, semantics is viewed as an organized set of rules that connect a representation of meaning (Semantic Representation) to a representation of the sentence (Deep-Syntactic Representation). The approach is particularly interesting for computer assisted language learning, natural language processing and computational lexicography, as our linguistic rules easily lend themselves to formalization and computer applications. The model combines abstract theoretical constructions with numerous linguistic descriptions, as well as multiple practice exercises that provide a solid hands-on approach to learning how to describe natural language semantics.
How do infants learn a language? Why and how do languages evolve? How do we understand a sentence? This book explores these questions using recent computational models that shed new light on issues related to language and cognition. The chapters in this collection propose original analyses of specific problems and develop computational models that have been tested and evaluated on real data. Featuring contributions from a diverse group of experts, this interdisciplinary book bridges the gap between natural language processing and cognitive sciences. It is divided into three sections, focusing respectively on models of neural and cognitive processing, data driven methods, and social issues in language evolution. This book will be useful to any researcher and advanced student interested in the analysis of the links between the brain and the language faculty.
