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...

We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants read sentences, some of which contained an anomalous word. In the critical sentences (e.g., The meal was devouring. . .), the syntactic cues unambiguously signaled an Agent interpretation of the subject noun, whereas the semantic cues supported a Theme interpretation. An Agent interpretation would render the main verb semantic...

In order to yield the intended interpretation for quantified expressions and comparatives, a compositional interpretation based on syntactic structure alone is not always possible. In the interpretation of these expressions, contextual information plays an important role. In general, we argue that context allows for a set of possible interpretations of an expression. Syntax may reduce this set ...

Syntactic models should be descriptively adequate and parsable. A syntactic description is autonomous in the sense that it has certain explicit formal properties. Such a description relates to the semantic interpretation of the sentences , and to the surface text. As the formalism is implemented in a broad-coverage syntactic parser, we concentrate on issues that must be resolved by any practica...

Structural priming reveals a new horizon in the research of bilingual syntactic representations. It facilitates the interpretation of bilingual syntactic transfer and syntactic misuse. So structural priming in L2 (second language) is practically meaningful for L2 teaching and learning. This paper attempts to review the within-language and between-language priming, as well as interaction studies...

In this paper, we provide a statistical machine learning representation of textual entailment via syntactic graphs constituted by tree pairs. We show that the natural way of representing the syntactic relations between text and hypothesis consists in the huge feature space of all possible syntactic tree fragment pairs, which can only be managed using kernel methods. Experiments with Support Vec...

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain well-known problems associated with compositionality....