Chunks and the notion of activation : a facilitation model for sentence processing (Chunks et activation : un modèle de facilitation du traitement linguistique) [in French]

Chunks and the notion of activation : a facilitation model for sentence processing We propose in this paper to integrate the notion of chunk within a global architecture for sentence processing. Chunks play an important role in cognitive theories such as ACT-R cite Anderson04 : they constitute global processing units which can be accessed directly via short or long term memory buffers. Chunks are built on the basis of an activation function evaluating their relationship to the context. We propose an interpretation of this theory applied to parsing. A construction mechanism is proposed, based on an adapted version of the activation function which takes advantage of the representation of linguistic information in terms of constraints. This feature allows to show how chunks are easy to build and how they can facilitate treatment. Several examples are given, illustrating this hypothesis of facilitation. MOTS-CLÉS : Chunks, ACT-R, activation, mémoire, parsing, traitement de la phrase, expérimen-