We present interpretation-based processing—a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the prior discourse. Our theory offers a unified account ...

This study evaluates the involvement of switching skills and working-memory capacity in auditory sentence processing in older adults. The authors examined 241 healthy participants, aged 55 to 88 years, who completed four neuropsychological tasks and two sentence-processing tasks. In addition to age and the expected contribution of working memory, switching ability, as measured by the number of ...

Often, applications of natural language processing assume a bag-of-words model to represent a sentence or a document, in which each word is treated independent of the remaining words. While sentence models following this assumption may yield satisfactory results when using corpora data, such models fail to capture the integration of words into context. As an essential part of language processin...

We discuss and illustrate Neural Blackboard Architectures (NBAs) as the basis for variable binding and combinatorial processing the brain. We focus on the NBA for sentence structure. NBAs are based on the notion that conceptual representations are in situ, hence cannot be copied or transported. Novel combinatorial structures can be formed with these representations by embedding them in NBAs. We...

This work addresses some questions about language processing: what does it mean that natural sentences are semantically complex? What semantic features can determine different degrees of difficulty for human comprehenders? Our goal is to introduce a framework argument complexity, in which the processing depends on typicality arguments sentence, is, their degree compatibility with selectional co...

It is commonplace and perfectly correct to speak of language as the "glue" that holds human society together, that links past and future in a social . intellectual, and legal tradition . No other behavioral capacity is more central to our individual comfort and success in society . That capacity depends upon an incredibly complex set of cognitive systems, served by a set of motor and perceptual...

This article presents the intonation system of Korean and English analyzed in the same theoretical framework (autosegmental-metrical phonology of intonation). The role of prosody in sentence processing is discussed focusing on the similarities and differences between the intonation systems of these two languages. Future research directions are suggested at the end.

Probabilistic models of sentence comprehension are increasingly relevant to questions concerning human language processing. However, such models are often limited to syntactic factors. This restriction is unrealistic in light of experimental results suggesting interactions between syntax and other forms of linguistic information in human sentence processing. To address this limitation, this art...

Language comprehension is a classic problem of reasoning under uncertainty. Language comes to us as a noisy, unsegmented, ambiguous mass of auditory waveforms or visual stimuli. Humans must somehow combine this input with other knowledge we have to come up with reasonable interpretations and actions. How might humans address this problem of decision-making under uncertainty? The best normative ...

There is ample evidence that native speakers anticipate upcoming information at various levels during sentence comprehension. In contrast, some studies on late second-language (L2) learners support the view that L2 learners do not anticipate information during processing, or at least, not to the same extent as native speakers do. In the current paper, I propose that native and L2 speakers are u...