Abstract To assess the presence of cross-linguistic influence, this study compared processing Dutch sentences by English–Dutch and German–Dutch bilingual monolingual children in a self-paced listening task. We combined insights from studies on child bilingualism adult second language acquisition. Sentence structures showing partial overlap between languages were investigated (long passives), as...

Speakers must choose between different alternative sentence structures in speaking. Studies in English (Bock & Loebell, 1990; Pickering & Branigan, 1998) have shown that this choice can be explained by representations which make use of SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES (e.g. NP-PP , NP-NP, etc.). The equivalent structural choices in Japanese are made up of the same syntactic category (i.e. NP). Using a tech...

The development of larger scale natural language systems has been hampered by the need to manually create mappings from syntactic structures into meaning representations. A new approach to semantic interpretation is proposed, which uses partial syntactic structures as the main unit of abstraction for interpretation rules. This approach can work for a variety of syntactic representations corresp...

This paper presents an application of Chinese syntactic knowledge for semantic role labeling (SRL). Besides basic morphological information, syntactic structures are crucial in SRL. However, it is difficult to learn such information from limited, small-scale, manually annotated training data. Instead of manually increasing the size of annotated data, we use a large amount of automatically extra...

in recent decades, research on the processing of grammatical structures in different languages has played a crucial role in psychological and linguistic studies. the present research aims to examine the extent to which arabic- and chinese-speaking learners apply passive voice and aspect in complement clauses in their pieces of writing. to that end, syntactic and pragmatic criteria of applying a...

This paper reports an on-line production study on how different levels of syntactic flexibility influence the production of locative resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Though previous studies show that having two available syntactic structures (flexible condition) facilitates language production and results in less errors and shorter reaction time than having only one possible synta...

This paper describes the key aspects of the system SynCoP (Syntactic Constraint Parser) developed at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The parser allows to combine syntactic tagging and chunking by means of constraint grammar using weighted finite state transducers (WFST). Chunks are interpreted as local dependency structures within syntactic tagging. The linguistic theor...