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While acknowledging the importance of language dynamics at the time scales of biological evolution, cultural language change, and child development, this chapter focuses primarily on the time scale of continuous dynamics in real-time language comprehension. A brief history of research in the field of sentence processing is offered, addressing debates over continuous processing and over interactive processing. Special attention is paid to eye-tracking reading evidence (and normalized recurrence simulations) of context influencing online syntactic processing. Effects of visual context on spoken word recognition (along with simulations of human data) are also described in detail. It is argued that a fruitful approach to understanding language comprehension entails treating sentence, word, and even phoneme recognition as a continuous trajectory in a high-dimensional state space that “flirts” with attractor basins but is rarely allowed to “linger” in them.

This chapter discusses syntax and syntactic cues, which are an important part of language processing. It presents the ingredients of a cognitive architecture of syntactic processing, with special attention to issues that are of relevance for studies on the neural architecture of syntax. Another part of the discussion focuses on the recent electrophysiological insights into syntactic processing, followed by a review of the relevant lesion literature and of recent brain-imaging studies that are focused on sentence processing.

This chapter first describes what has been learned about how readers process sentences, using information from individual words in combination with linguistic knowledge to generate larger units of meaning corresponding to phrases and sentences. The chapter then reviews what has been learned about sentence processing using various methods, but most notably, the measurement of readers’ eye movements. The chapter then reviews precursor theories and models of sentence processing—models that provide early attempts to explain how readers construct the meanings of phrases and sentences, and that motivate much of the subsequent research to understand the relative contributions of syntactic versus semantic information in sentence processing. The chapter then reviews a large, representative sample of the models that have been used to simulate and understand various facets of sentence processing. These are presented in their order of development to show how the models have evolved to accommodate new empirical findings. The chapter concludes with an explicit comparative analysis of the sentence-processing models and discussion of the empirical findings that each model can and cannot explain.

This chapter begins by reviewing some of the key psycholinguistic evidence motivating the need for experience-based mechanisms, before turning to a discussion of recent models. It focuses on probabilistic models of human sentence processing, which attempt to assign a probability to a given sentence, as well as to alternative parse interpretations for that sentence. It discusses the association between probabilistic models of performance (gradient grammaticality). A vital result of the proposed view is that the likelihood of a partial structure is only significant relative to the likelihood of competing (partial) structures, and does not give an independently useful characterization of the grammaticality of the alternatives. Therefore, it argues that a probabilistic description of gradient grammaticality should differ from a probabilistic performance model.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the limitations of current models of reading, and moves on to the reasons why more comprehensive models of reading are necessary to advance our understanding of the mental, perceptual, and motoric processes that support reading. The chapter then provides a comparative analysis of the various approaches that have been adopted to model reading, and how the theoretical assumptions of models of word identification, sentence processing, discourse representation, and eye-movement control might be combined to build a more comprehensive model of reading in its entirety. The remainder of the chapter then describes one such model, Über-Reader, and a series of simulations to illustrate how the model explains word identification, sentence processing, the encoding and recall of discourse meaning, and the patterns of eye movements that are observed during reading. The final sections of the chapter then address both the limitations and possible future applications of the model.

This chapter examines the neurocognition of language comprehension by using a broad-coverage model in combination with neuropsychological data on sentence processing. It first looks at the main language-relevant waveforms on recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) before discussing the contrast on syntactic processing between syntax-first and more interactive models of sentence processing. It proposes a cognitive model and links it to particular regions of the brain, suggesting that the left posterior superior temporal gyrus may be responsible for storage and retrieval of lexical information whereas the left posterior inferior frontal cortex is responsible for integrating the retrieved information. The chapter also considers the binding problem for language.

This chapter presents a methodology for the assessment of the native comprehension of Classical Greek starting from a discussion of the ancient primary evidence. This comes primarily from the ancient Greek rhetorical literature, in which ‘clarity’ and ‘obscurity’ are widely explored. On the grounds of such ancient materials, this chapter draws a distinction between clarity of form (‘processability’) and clarity of contents (‘understandability’) and focuses on the former, interpreted as a desideratum of all communication. The primary evidence on the ‘processability’ of linguistic structures for native speakers of Classical Greek is examined in the light of modern research on language comprehension. Subsections of this chapter examine in detail linguistic and paralinguistic phenomena from this perspective.

People use language to communicate their perceptions and conceptions of the world, and underlying this communication is the linguistic system that interacts with the human perceptual and conceptual machinery. This is supported by research on sentence comprehension among adults. This chapter examines theories of sentence processing in children and adults. It comments on a study John Trueswell et al. (1999) in which they demonstrated that five-year-old children appeared to be unable to use contextual cues to resolve ambiguity in sentences such as “Put the frog on the napkin into the box.” Trueswell et al. explained this finding by arguing that children have limited working memory capacity that prevents them from using information from the context to disambiguate linguistic input. The chapter first discusses real-time sentence processing in adults before presenting a developmental account of sentence comprehension. It then considers the so-called Kindergarten-path Effect along with referential scenes, definite reference, and restrictive modifiers. It also looks at the effects of discourse and pragmatics on parsing by children and concludes with a discussion of the development of attention in children.

This chapter explores parsing and grammar in children, with an emphasis on how children resolve sentences with ambiguous scope. It focuses on an ambiguity involving the universal quantifier every in subject position along with a negated main predicate, as in the sentence “Every horse didn’t jump over the fence.” One interpretation of this sentence is the “surface-scope” interpretation, which views the expression every horse as a reference to all the horses in the set; thus, each horse in the set did not jump over the fence. Another interpretation is the “inverse-scope” interpretation, whereby some horses jumped over the fence while others did not. The chapter presents evidence suggesting that children tend to prefer the surface-scope interpretation and cannot obtain the inverse-scope interpretation. In other words, children systematically use the surface position of the relevant quantificational elements to determine scope relations. The chapter also discusses negation and quantified noun phrases, along with isomorphism. Finally, it discusses the implications of these findings for language development and sentence processing.

This chapter empirically investigates the issue of systematicity and connectionism under more realistic conditions than was the case in previous studies. A connectionist and a symbolic model of sentence processing are compared on their ability to perform systematically. Both models are trained on over 700,000 sentences, and tested on 361 sentences, from naturally occurring texts. Although the symbolic model does display slightly stronger systematicity, there is a striking similarity between the two models’ performance. It is argued that real-world tasks pose such strong demands and constraints that performance cannot differ much across models. Consequently, the issue of systematicity loses much of its relevance.

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) allows semantically equivalent alternate surface derivations typified by the sentence “Harry admires Louise,” as well as English noun phrases, to have all of the type-raised categories allowed by a full-blown morphological case system. Many critics have argued that this so-called spurious ambiguity makes CCG quite impracticable to apply to useful tasks such as parsing and question answering in open domains, regardless of its linguistic attractions. This chapter examines how CCG can be used for efficient natural language processing. It first considers algorithms that have formed the basis of a number of practical CCG parsers before turning to logical forms and how they are built with CCG. The chapter also discusses processing scope and pronominal reference in CCG, generation of strings from logical forms using CCG, the use of scope for rapid inference in support of question answering or textual entailment, and human sentence processing.

This book, a collection of work presented in a special session at the Sixteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing held in 2003, focuses on language processing and language acquisition. It addresses a variety of questions related to linguistic reference, an active area of research in both linguistics and psycholinguistics. In particular, the book explores how children and adults acquire and process referential information. It also looks at literature using the visual-world paradigm and literature based on corpora and reading experiments, including studies that employ eye-tracking methods. It examines how children and adults use the referential context to guide their online parsing decisions, along with theories of adult and child sentence processing, how sentences with ambiguous scope are resolved by children, theories of binding and coreference in human language, the use of pragmatic information in language comprehension, the behavior of full noun-phrase anaphors in discourse contexts, antecedent accessibility and salience in reference, and how different determiners and quantifiers make different sets of entities available for reference.

This chapter examines grammar and meaning for children. It suggests that children, even adults, often use words with no meaning and ignore grammatical convention. It discusses the difficulties of children in learning about what pronoun can and cannot refer to and their problems in role assignment and sentence processing. It also compares the use of pronouns, such as he and himself, that, and this in spoken language and in sign language.

The domain-specific approach to working memory assumes specialized working memory systems dedicated to maintaining different types of information (e.g. orthographic, phonological, semantic, visuospatial) which serve to support processing in that domain. These storage systems are assumed to be separate from long-term memory representations in each domain and also from attentional and cognitive control processes. This chapter provides an overview of support for this approach drawn mainly from neuropsychological case study and case series approaches, though it also integrates findings from behavioural and imaging studies of healthy individuals that were motivated by the neuropsychological findings or provide confirmation of those findings. The neuropsychological findings not only demonstrate dissociations between working memory in different domains but also provide a rich source of evidence to address the nature of forgetting in working memory, the interactions between working memory and long-term memory, and the role of aspects of working memory in language comprehension and production.

In CBLS, Bever laid the foundation for consideration of how lexical and syntactic information converge to shape sentence comprehension processes. This chapter aims to extend that approach by considering how language production can inform language patterns and language comprehension. The Production Distribution Comprehension (PDC) account seeks to understand why language producers converge on certain utterance forms and not others, the consequences of those choices for the distributional patterns of words and syntactic structures in the language environment, and how language users implicitly learn these patterns and use them to guide online interpretation language input. This approach unifies accounts of comprehension difficulty in several types of relative clauses that Bever discusses, and suggests that production processes must be an integral part of accounts of language comprehension.

Doubly center-embedded relative clause constructions such as “The rat that the cat that the dog chased killed ate the malt” are notoriously difficult to parse. Many explanations have been offered. This chapter proposes a novel one: an alignment problem at the syntax-prosody interface, consisting of a mismatch between the heavily nested syntactic structure and the flat structure required by prosodic phrasing. Selective shrinking and lengthening of phrases within the sentence can coax the prosodic processor into creating rhythmic packages that fit well with the nested syntactic tree structure. Long outer phrases and short inner ones help with that, while short outer phrases and long inner ones hinder it. The chapter discusses two experiments—reading aloud with facilitation; reading aloud followed by grammaticality judgment—that provide evidence that produced prosody is the causal link between phrase lengths and ease of processing, though not exhibiting a “missing-VP effect” for either sentence type.

This chapter analyzes why CBLS has played such a central role in the history of psycholinguistic research. On the one hand, many lines of research in sentence processing were inspired by the fundamental questions raised in CBLS and the insights and provocative hypotheses that Bever proposed as answers to these questions. On the other hand, it led researchers to think outside the box and to question existing orthodoxies. Thus, CBLS has a uniquely catalytic effect on research about the structure of language and especially how language is produced, comprehended, and learned.

Unlike English nouns, Mandarin nouns do not syntactically reflect the mass/count distinction, but are akin to English mass nouns (e.g. water) in that they refer to unindividuated pluralities. Thus speakers must use classifiers after numerals and demonstratives to semantically partition all nouns: count concepts must be counted with a classifier (一架钢琴, one FRAME piano) the way English mass nouns are (one GLASS OF water). While an ontological distinction is not apparent in Chinese nouns, some have argued that this information might be encoded at the classifier level and that classifiers might play a functional role similar to that of gender-marked determiners. In order to better understand the role massifiers and classifiers play in language comprehension, three visual world experiments were conducted. Phonological cohort competition and anticipatory eye-movements were examined in cases of English mass reference, Chinese count reference, and Chinese mass reference. Results suggest that classifiers are interpreted structurally and have an immediate impact on referential selection, and this effect is potentially stronger with massifiers and mass referents.