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.
Binder, K. S., S. A. Duffy, and K. Rayner. "The effects of thematic fit and discourse context on syntactic ambiguity resolution." Journal of Memory and Language 44 (2001): 297-324.
Caplan D., and G. S. Waters. "Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension." Brain and Behavioral Sciences (1999).
PubMed abstract: This target article discusses the verbal working memory system used in sentence comprehension. We review the concept of working memory as a short-duration system in which small amounts of information are simultaneously stored and manipulated in the service of accomplishing a task. We summarize the argument that syntactic processing in sentence comprehension requires such a storage and computational system. We then ask whether the working memory system used in syntactic processing is the same as that used in verbally mediated tasks that involve conscious controlled processing. Evidence is brought to bear from various sources: the relationship between individual differences in working memory and individual differences in the efficiency of syntactic processing; the effect of concurrent verbal memory load on syntactic processing; and syntactic processing in patients with poor short-term memory, patients with poor working memory, and patients with aphasia. Experimental results from these normal subjects and patients with various brain lesions converge on the conclusion that there is a specialization in the verbal working memory system for assigning the syntactic structure of a sentence and using that structure in determining sentence meaning that is separate from the working memory system underlying the use of sentence meaning to accomplish other functions. We present a theory of the divisions of the verbal working memory system and suggestions regarding its neural basis.
Desmet, T., and E. Gibson. "Disambiguation Preferences and Corpus Frequencies in Noun Phrase Conjunction." Manuscript submitted for publication, 2002.
Elman, J. L. "Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks and grammatical structure." In Machine Learning 7, 1991, pp. 195-225.
Ferreira, F. "Prosody." In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Macmillan, 2000.
Frazier, L., and C. Clifton Jr. Construal Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1996).
Gibson, E. "Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies." Cognition 68 (1998): 1-76.
PubMed abstract: This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory--the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT)--has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is hypothesized to be quantified in terms of the number of syntactic categories that are necessary to complete the current input string as a grammatical sentence. Furthermore, in accordance with results from the working memory literature both memory cost and integration cost are hypothesized to be heavily influenced by locality (1) the longer a predicted category must be kept in memory before the prediction is satisfied, the greater is the cost for maintaining that prediction; and (2) the greater the distance between an incoming word and the most local head or dependent to which it attaches, the greater the integration cost. The SPLT is shown to explain a wide range of processing complexity phenomena not previously accounted for under a single theory, including (1) the lower complexity of subject-extracted relative clauses compared to object-extracted relative clauses, (2) numerous processing overload effects across languages, including the unacceptability of multiply center-embedded structures, (3) the lower complexity of cross-serial dependencies relative to center-embedded dependencies, (4) heaviness effects, such that sentences are easier to understand when larger phrases are placed later and (5) numerous ambiguity effects, such as those which have been argued to be evidence for the Active Filler Hypothesis.
------. "The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity." In Image, language, brain. Edited by Y. Miyashita, A. Marantz, and W. O'Neil. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Gibson, E., and C. Schutze. "Disambiguation preferences in noun phrase conjunction do not mirror corpus frequency." Journal of Memory and Language 40 (1999): 263-279.
Gibson, E., and N. Pearlmutter. "Constraints on sentence comprehension." Trends in Cognitive Science 2 (1998): 262-268.
Gibson, E., and S. Tunstall. "Sentence comprehension without keeping track of contingent frequency information." Manuscript submitted for publication, 2001.
Gibson, E., and T. Warren. "The psychological reality of intermediate linguistic structure in long-distance dependencies." Manuscript, 1998.
Gibson, E., N. Pearlmutter, E. Canseco-Gonzales, and G. Hickok. "Recency Preference in the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism." Cognition 59 (1996): 23-59.
PubMed abstract: Cuetos and Mitchell (1988) observed that in constructions in which a relative clause can attach to one of two possible sites, English speakers prefer the more recent attachment site, but Spanish speakers prefer the least recent attachment site, in violation of the proposed universal principle Late Closure (Recency Preference), which favors attachments to the most recent sites. Based on this evidence, Cuetos and Mitchell concluded that Late Closure is not a universal principle of the human sentence processing mechanism. In this paper, we provide new evidence from Spanish and English self-paced reading experiments on relative clause attachment ambiguities that involve three possible attachment sites. The results of our experiments suggest that a principle like Late Closure is in fact universally operative in the human parser, but that it is modulated by at least one other factor in the processing of relative clause attachment ambiguities. We propose that the second factor involved in the processing of these and related constructions is the principle of Predicate Proximity, according to which attachments are preferred to be as structurally close to the head of a predicate phrase as possible, and we further consider the origins and predictions of the theory combining these two factors.
Gibson E., T. Desmet, D. Grodner, D. Watson, and K. Ko. "Reading relative clauses in English." MIT Manuscript, 2001.
Gordon, P. C., R. Hendrick, and M. Johnson. "Memory interference during language processing." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition (2001).
Grodner, D., E. Gibson, and D. Watson. "The Influence of Contextual Contrast on Syntactic Processing: Evidence for Strong-Interaction in Sentence Comprehension." Manuscript submitted for publication, 2001.
Grodner, D., E. Gibson, and S. Tunstall. "Syntactic complexity in ambiguity resolution." Journal of Memory and Language 46 (2002): 267-295.
Hemforth, B., L. Konieczny, and C. Scheepers. "Syntactic attachment and anaphor resolution: The two sides of relative clause attachment." In Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing. Edited by M. Crocker, M. Pickering, and C. Clifton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 259-281.
Jurafsky, D. "A probabilistic model of lexical and syntactic access and disambiguation." Cognitive Science 20 (1996): 137-194.
Just, M. A., and P. A. Carpenter. "A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory." Psychological Review 99 (1992): 122-149.
PubMed abstract: A theory of the way working memory capacity constrains comprehension is proposed. The theory proposes that both processing and storage are mediated by activation and that the total amount of activation available in working memory varies among individuals. Individual differences in working memory capacity for language can account for qualitative and quantitative differences among college-age adults in several aspects of language comprehension. One aspect is syntactic modularity: The larger capacity of some individuals permits interaction among syntactic and pragmatic information, so that their syntactic processes are not informationally encapsulated. Another aspect is syntactic ambiguity: The larger capacity of some individuals permits them to maintain multiple interpretations. The theory is instantiated as a production system model in which the amount of activation available to the model affects how it adapts to the transient computational and storage demands that occur in comprehension.
Kaan, E., A. Harris, E. Gibson, and P. Holcomb. "The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty." Language and Cognitive Processes 15 (2000): 159-201.
Lewis, R. L. "Interference in short term memory: The magical number two (or three) in sentence processing." Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 25 (1996): 93-117.
PubMed abstract: Many theories have been proposed to explain difficulty with center embedded constructions, most attributing the problem to some kind of limited-capacity short-term memory. However, these theories have developed for the most part independently of more traditional memory research, which has focused on uncovering general principles such as chunking and interference. This article attempts to gain some unification with this research by suggesting that an interesting range of core sentence processing phenomena can be explained as interference effects in a sharply limited syntactic working memory. These include difficult and acceptable embeddings, as well as certain limitations on ambiguity resolution, length effects in garden path structures, and the requirement for locality in syntactic structure. The theory takes the form of an architecture for parsing that can index no more than two constituents under the same syntactic relation. A limitation of two or three items shows up in a variety of other verbal short-term memory tasks as well.
MacDonald, M. "Priming effects from gaps to antecedents." Language and Cognitive Processes 4 (1989): 35-56.
MacDonald, M. C., and M. Christiansen. "Individual differences without working memory." Psychological Review (in press).
MacDonald, M., N. Pearlmutter, and M. Seidenberg. "The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution." Psychological Review 101 (1994): 676-703.
PubMed abstract: Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.
McKoon, G., R. Ratcliff, and D. Albritton. "Sentential context effects on lexical decisions with a cross-modal instead of an all-visual procedure." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 22 (1996): 1494-1497.
PubMed abstract: J. L. Nicol and D. Swinney (1989) reported facilitation in a cross-modal lexical-decision task as evidence that implicit objects of verbs (WH-traces) are reinstated during comprehension. G. McKoon and R. Ratcliff (1994) found the same priming effects in the absence of implicit objects, suggesting that the effects are attributable to some factor other than a syntactic process that would fill in implicit objects. J. L. Nicol, J. D. Fodor, and D. Swinney (1994) questioned the relevance of McKoon and Ratcliff's findings because they were obtained with all-visual rather than cross-modal presentation. In 2 experiments, the authors replicated McKoon and Ratcliff's results using cross-modal lexical decision.
Mitchell, D. C., F. Cuetos, M. M. B. Corley, and M. Brysbaert, "Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (non-lexical) statistical records." Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24 (1996): 469-488.
Ni, W., S. Crain, and D. Shankweiler. "Sidestepping garden-paths: Assessing the contributions of syntax, semantics and plausibility in resolving ambiguities." Language and Cognitive Processes 11 (1996): 283-334.
Osterhout, L. "Event-related brain potentials as tools." In Perspectives in Sentence Processing. By C. Clifton, L. Frazier, and K. Rayner. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994, pp. 15-44.
Patel, A. D., E. Gibson, J. Ratner, M. Besson, and P. Holcomb. "Processing grammatical relations in language and music: An event-related potential study." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10 (1998): 717-733.
PubMed abstract: In order to test the language-specificity of a known neural correlate of syntactic processing [the P600 event-related brain potential (ERP) component], this study directly compared ERPs elicited by syntactic incongruities in language and music. Using principles of phrase structure for language and principles of harmony and key-relatedness for music, sequences were constructed in which an element was either congruous, moderately incongruous, or highly incongruous with the preceding structural context. A within-subjects design using 15 musically educated adults revealed that linguistic and musical structural incongruities elicited positivities that were statistically indistinguishable in a specified latency range. In contrast, a music-specific ERP component was observed that showed antero-temporal right-hemisphere lateralization. The results argue against the language-specificity of the P600 and suggest that language and music can be studied in parallel to address questions of neural specificity in cognitive processing.
Pearlmutter, N., and E. Gibson. "Recency and verb phrase attachment." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition (2001).
PubMed abstract: Four experiments investigated attachment preferences in constructions involving 3 verb phrases (VPs) followed by an attaching modifier. Readers preferred attachment to the most recent (lowest) VP site overall and preferred to attach the modifier to the middle VP over the highest VP, demonstrating a monotonic recency-based preference ordering. This pattern could not be attributed to lexical or plausibility-based preferences. The results contrast with the pattern for relative clause attachment into 3 potential noun phrase sites, where the preference ordering is nonmonotonic (e.g., E. Gibson, N. J. Pearlmutter, E. Canseco-Gonzalez, & G. Hickok, 1996), and support the multiple-constraint theory described by E. Gibson and N. J. Pearlmutter (1998), which proposes that recency/locality and a secondary factor, predicate proximity, combine with lexical, grammatical, prosodic, and contextual constraints to determine attachment preferences.
Pearlmutter, N. J., and A. Mendelsohn. "Serial versus parallel sentence comprehension." Manuscript submitted for publication, 1999.
Pearlmutter, N. J., and M. C. MacDonald. "Individual differences and probablistic constraints in syntactic ambiguity resolution." Journal of Memory and Language 34 (1995): 521-542.
Pickering, M., and G. Barry. "Sentence processing without empty categories." Language and Cognitive Processes 6 (1991): 229-259.
Rohde, D., and D. Plaut. "Language acquisition in the absence of explicit negative evidence: how important is starting small?" Cognition 72 (1999): 67-109.
PubMed abstract: It is commonly assumed that innate linguistic constraints are necessary to learn a natural language, based on the apparent lack of explicit negative evidence provided to children and on Gold's proof that, under assumptions of virtually arbitrary positive presentation, most interesting classes of languages are not learnable. However, Gold's results do not apply under the rather common assumption that language presentation may be modeled as a stochastic process. Indeed, Elman (Elman, J.L., 1993. Learning and development in neural networks: the importance of starting small. Cognition 48, 71-99) demonstrated that a simple recurrent connectionist network could learn an artificial grammar with some of the complexities of English, including embedded clauses, based on performing a word prediction task within a stochastic environment. However, the network was successful only when either embedded sentences were initially withheld and only later introduced gradually, or when the network itself was given initially limited memory which only gradually improved. This finding has been taken as support for Newport's 'less is more' proposal, that child language acquisition may be aided rather than hindered by limited cognitive resources. The current article reports on connectionist simulations which indicate, to the contrary, that starting with simplified inputs or limited memory is not necessary in training recurrent networks to learn pseudonatural languages; in fact, such restrictions hinder acquisition as the languages are made more English-like by the introduction of semantic as well as syntactic constraints. We suggest that, under a statistical model of the language environment, Gold's theorem and the possible lack of explicit negative evidence do not implicate innate, linguistic-specific mechanisms. Furthermore, our simulations indicate that special teaching methods or maturational constraints may be unnecessary in learning the structure of natural language.
Sedivy, J. "Invoking discourse-based contrast sets and resolving syntactic ambiguities." Journal of Memory and Language 46 (2002): 341-370.
Spivey-Knowlton, M., and J. Sedivy. "Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints." Cognition 55 (1995): 227-267.
PubMed abstract: Different theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution argue for different sources of information determining initial parsing decisions (e.g., structurally defined parsing principles, lexically specific biases, or referential pragmatics). However, a "constraint-based" approach to syntactic ambiguity resolution proposes that both lexically specific biases and referential pragmatics are used in parallel by the comprehender. Analyses of text corpora, sentence fragment completions, and self-paced reading experiments were conducted to demonstrate that both local information (lexically specific biases) and contextual information (referential presupposition) contribute to the on-line resolution of prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. There does not appear to be a role for purely structurally defined parsing principles (i.e., minimal attachment). Present and previous evidence is consistent with a developing framework in which multiple constraints (bottom-up and top-down) interact immediately to determine initial syntactic commitments.
Spivey-Knowlton, M., and M. K. Tanenhaus. "Referential context and syntactic ambiguity resolution." In Perspectives in Sentence Processing. Edited by C. Clifton, L. Frazier, and K. Rayner. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994, pp. 415-439.
Sturt, P., M. J. Pickering, and M. W. Crocker. "Structural change and reanalysis difficulty in language comprehension." Journal of Memory and Language 40 (1999): 136-150.
Tabor, W., C. Juliano, and M. K. Tanenhaus. "Parsing in a dynamical system: An attractor-based account of the interaction of lexical and structural constraints in sentence processing." Language and Cognitive Processes 12 (1997): 211-272.
Tanenhaus, M., M. Spivey-Knowlton, K. Eberhard, and J. Sedivy. "Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension." Science 268 (1995): 1632-1634.
PubMed abstract: 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.
Trueswell, J. C. "The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution." Journal of Memory and Language 35 (1996): 566-585.
Trueswell, J. C., and M. K. Tanenhaus. "Toward a lexicalist framework of constraint based syntactic ambiguity resolution." In Perspectives in Sentence Processing. Edited by C. Clifton, L. Frazier, and K. Rayner. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994, pp. 155-180.
Watson, D., and E. Gibson. "The relationship between intonational phrasing and linguistic structure." Manuscript submitted for publication, 2001.
Warren, T., and E. Gibson. "The influence of referential processing on sentence complexity." Manuscript submitted for publication (2001).
Wolf, F., and Gibson. "Parsing: Overview." In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MacMillan (in press).