The readings listed below are the foundation of this course. Where available, journal article abstracts from
PubMed (an online database providing access to citations from biomedical literature) are included. There is no required textbook for this course; however, the following readings are required.
Boroditsky, L. "First-language thinking for second-language understanding: Mandarin and Chinese speakers' conception of time." In Proceedings of the Twenty-first annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Vancouver, BC, 1999.
Elman, J.L. "Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks and grammatical structure." In Machine Learning. 1991, 7, 195-225.
Ferreira, F. "Prosody." In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MacMillan, 2000.
Fromkin, V.A. & N.B. Ratner. "Speech production." In Psycholinguistics. Edited by J. Berko Gleason & N.B. Ratner. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Gibson, E. "The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity." In Image, language, brain. Edited by Y. Miyashita, A. Marantz & W. O'Neil. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 2000, 95-126.
Gibson, E. "Linguistic complexity in sentence comprehension. In To appear in The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MacMillan, 2001.
Gibson, E., E. Chen, & F. Wolf. "Online Syntactic Storage Costs in Sentence Comprehension." In MIT manuscript. 2002.
Gibson, E., T. Desmet, D. G. Watson, D. Grodner, & K. Ko. "Reading relative clauses in English." In Manuscript submitted for publication, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT. 2001.
Gibson, E., & N. Pearlmutter. "Constraints on sentence comprehension." In Trends in Cognitive Science. 1998, 2, 262-268.
Gleitman, L.R., & E. L. Newport. "The invention of language by children: Environmental and biological influences on the acquisition of language." In Language. Edited by L.R. Gleitman and M. Liberman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 995, 1-24.
Grodner, D., E. Gibson, & D. Watson. "Discourse contrast and sentential complexity." In Manuscript submitted for publication, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT. 2001.
Hsiao, F., & E. Gibson. "Processing relative clauses in Chinese." In MIT manuscript. 2002.
Jurafsky, D., & J. H. Martin. "Speech and language processing." In Upper Saddle River. NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000.
Kaan, E., A. Harris, E. Gibson, & P. Holcomb. "The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty." In Language and Cognitive Processes. 2000, 15, 159-201.
Lasnik, H. "The forms of sentences." In Language. Edited by L.R. Gleitman and M Liberman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, 283-310.
Osterhout, L. "Event-related brain potentials as tools." Edited by C. Clifton, L. Frazier, and K. Rayner. In Perspectives in Sentence Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994, 15-44.
Pinker, S. "Language acquisition." Edited by L.R. Gleitman and M. Liberman. In Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, 135-183.
Sedivy, J.C., M. K. Tanenhaus, G. C. Chambers, & G. N. Carlson. "Achieving incremental semantic interpretation through contextual representation." In Cognition. 1999, 71, 109-147.
PubMed abstracts: While much work has been done investigating the role of context in the incremental processing of syntactic indeterminacies, relatively little is known about online semantic interpretation. The experiments in this article made use of the eye-tracking paradigm with spoken language and visual contexts in order to examine how, and when listeners make use of contextually-defined contrast in interpreting simple prenominal adjectives. Experiment 1 focused on intersective adjectives. Experiment 1A provided further evidence that intersective adjectives are processed incrementally. Experiment 1B compared response times to follow instructions such as 'Pick up the blue comb' under conditions where there were two blue objects (e.g. a blue pen and a blue comb), but only one of these objects had a contrasting member in the display. Responses were faster to objects with a contrasting member, establishing that the listeners initially assume a contrastive interpretation for intersective adjectives. Experiments 2 and 3 focused on vague scalar adjectives examining the time course with which listeners establish contrast for scalar adjectives such as tall using information provided by the head noun (e.g. glass) and information provided by the visual context. Use of head-based information was examined by manipulating the typicality of the target object (e.g. whether it was a good or poor example of a tall glass. Use of context-dependent contrast was examined by either having only a single glass in the display (the no contrast condition) or a contrasting object (e.g. a smaller glass). The pattern of results indicated that listeners interpreted the scalar adjective incrementally taking into account context-specific contrast prior to encountering the head. Moreover, the presence of a contrasting object, sharply reduced, and in some conditions completely eliminated, typicality effects. The results suggest a language processing system in which semantic interpretation, as well as syntactic processing, is conducted incrementally, with early integration of contextual information.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & A. Turk. "A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing." In Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 1996. 25, 193-247.
PubMed abstracts: In this tutorial we present evidence that, because syntax does not fully predict the way that spoken utterances are organized, prosody is a significant issue for studies of auditory sentence processing. We describe the basic elements and principles of current prosodic theory, review the psycholinguistic evidence that supports an active role for prosodic structure in sentence representation, and provide a road map of references that contain more complete arguments about prosodic structure and prominence. Because current theories do not predict the precise prosodic shape that a particular utterance will take, it is important to determine the prosodic choices that a speaker has made for utterances that are used in an auditory sentence processing study. To this end, we provide information about practical tools such as systems for signal display and prosodic transcription, and several caveats which we have found useful to keep in mind.
Spivey-Knowlton, M., & M. K. Tanenhaus. "Referential context and syntactic ambiguity resolution." In Perspectives in Sentence Processing. Edited by Clifton, C., L. Frazier, and K. Rayner. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994, 415-439.
Tanenhaus, M., M. Spivey-Knowlton, K. Eberhard, & J. Sedivy. "Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension." In Science. 1995, 268, 1632-1634.
PubMed abstracts: Psycholinguists have commonly assumed that as a spoken linguistic message unfolds over time, it is initially structured by a syntactic processing module that is encapsulated from information provided by other perceptual and cognitive systems. To test the effects of relevant visual context on the rapid mental processes that accompany spoken language comprehension, eye movements were recorded with a head-mounted eye-tracking system while subjects followed instructions to manipulate real objects. Visual context influenced spoken word recognition and mediated syntactic processing, even during the earliest moments of language processing.
Tartter, V.C. "Language and its normal processing." In Thousand Oaks. CA: Sage, 1998.
Trueswell, J.C., & M. K. Tanenhaus. "Toward a lexicalist framework of constraint-based syntactic ambiguity resolution." In Perspectives in Sentence Processing. Edited by Clifton, C., L. Frazier, and K. Rayner. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994, 155-180.
Watson, D., & E. Gibson, "The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production." In Manuscript submitted for publication. 2002.
Whitney, P. "The psychology of language." Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Wolf, F., & E. Gibson "Parsing: Overview." In To appear in The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MacMillan, 2001.
Wolf, F., E. Gibson & Desmet. "Discourse coherence and pronoun resolution." In Manuscript submitted for publication. 2002.