It has been observed that grammaticality judgments do not necessarily reflect relative corpus frequencies: it is possible that structure A is judged as more grammatical than structure B, whereas at the same time structure B occurs more often in actual language data than structure A. In recent work (Boersma & Hayes 2001), we have used Stochastic Optimality Theory to model grammaticality judgment...

Every winning candidate (grammatical output) is a last resort under OT. It is the best one (or within the set of the best ones) left after the impossible have been eliminated: the last one standing. I will refer to the observation that grammatical structures have a last resort appearance as the Last Resort (LR) effect. The LR effect is a theorem of OT. There is no “Last Resort” principle or con...

Readability of a summary is usually graded manually on five aspects of readability: grammaticality, coherence and structure, focus, referential clarity and non-redundancy. In the context of automated metrics for evaluation of summary quality, content evaluations have been presented through the last decade and continue to evolve, however a careful examination of readability aspects of summary qu...

An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from th...

Abstract Without having seen a bigram like “her buffalo”, you can easily tell that it is congruent because “buffalo” be aligned with more common nouns “cat” or “dog” have been in contexts cat” dog”—the novel structurally aligns representations memory. We present new class of associative nets we call Dynamic-Eigen-Nets , and provide simulations show how they generalize to patterns are the traini...

In grammatical error correction (GEC), automatically evaluating system outputs requires gold-standard references, which must be created manually and thus tend to be both expensive and limited in coverage. To address this problem, a referenceless approach has recently emerged; however, previous reference-less metrics that only consider the criterion of grammaticality, have not worked as well as ...

tsimpli and dimitrakopoulou (2007) observed that uninterpretable features are unavailable in second language (l2) acquisition after the critical period. in this paper, we verify this claim by providing evidence from persian speaking learners of english as an l2 on the status of resumptive pronouns (rps) as uniterpretable features. unlike english which does not allow rps, persian shows various b...

this study investigated the relative effects of deductive and inductive form-focused instruction (ffi) on the acquisition of 4 non-generic definite article uses(cultural, situational, structural, and textual) as assessed by explicit and implicit outcome measures. the tests utilized to assess efl learners' acquisition of definite article uses were timed and untimed grammaticality judgment tests....

In this paper, I make two theoretical claims: (i) For some form to be grammatical in language L, it is not necessary that the form satisfy all constraints that are active in L, i.e. even grammatical forms can violate constraints. (ii) There are degrees of ungrammaticality, i.e. not all ungrammatical forms are equally ungrammatical. I first show that these claims follow straightforwardly from th...