In 2 experiments, eye tracking methodology was used to assess on-line lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In Experiment 1, lexical identification was examined by manipulating the frequency of target words. Both typically developed (TD) and ASD readers showed normal frequency effects, suggesting that the processes TD and ASD readers engage in to identify...

Sentences containing plural numerical expressions (e.g., two boys) can give rise to two interpretations (collective and distributive), arising from the fact that their representation admits of a part-whole structure. We present the results of a series of experiments designed to explore children's understanding of this distinction and its implications for the acquisition of linguistic expression...

Thorough investigation of early syntactic knowledge necessitates methodologies that tap young children's linguistic competence while minimizing extra-linguistic demands and not relying on production. The preferential looking paradigm is uniquely suited to such a task. We present here a test case for the exploration of early syntactic knowledge in young children: Principle C effects at 30 months...

In this paper we will discuss interpretation of adverbs in Japanese. We will explore the division of labor between the syntactic requirements, semantic requirements, and discourse-contextual constraints involving adverbial interpretation. It will then be argued that this inter-modular approach utilizing LFG explains various elusive paradigms of the adverbs. 1. Scope Ambiguity and Lexical Semant...

This paper presents a method to understand spoken Tunisian dialect based on lexical semantic. This method takes into account the specificity of the Tunisian dialect which has no linguistic processing tools. This method is ontology-based which allows exploiting the ontological concepts for semantic annotation and ontological relations for speech interpretation. This combination increases the rat...

In this article, we explore an integration of a formal semantic approach to lexical meaning and an approach based on distributional methods. First, we outline a formal semantic theory that aims to combine the virtues of both formal and distributional frameworks. We then proceed to develop an algebraic interpretation of that formal semantic theory and show how at least two kinds of distributiona...

I propose that the characteristics of the scope disamhiguation process observed in the literature can be explained in terms of the way in which the model of the situation described by a sentence is built. The model construction procedure I present builds an event structure by identifying the situations associated with the operators in the sentence and their mutual dependency relations, as well ...

The interpretation of logical metonymies like begin the book has traditionally been explained by assuming the existence of complex lexical entries containing information about event knowledge (qualia roles: reading the book/writing the book). Qualia structure provides concrete constraints on interpretation, which are however too rigid to be cognitively plausible. We suggest generalized event kn...

Collaborative completions are among the strongest evidence that dialogue requires coordination even at the sub-sentential level; the study of sentence completions may thus shed light on a number of central issues both at the `macro’ level of dialogue management and at the `micro’ level of the semantic interpretation of utterances. We propose a treatment of collaborative completions in PTT, a th...

This paper describes a workbench system for constructing a dictionary to interpret compound nouns, which integrates the acquisition of semantic information and interpretation of compound nouns. First, we extract semantic information from a machine readable dictionary and corpora using regular expressions. Then, the semantic relation of compound nouns are interpreted based on semantic relations,...