Spontaneous speech differs in several ways from the sentences often studied in psycholinguistics experiments. One important difference is that naturally produced utterances often contain disfluencies. In this study, we examined how the presence of ‘‘uh’’ in a spoken sentence might affect processes that assign syntactic structure (i.e., parsing). Four experiments are reported. In the first, part...

Classic reduced relative clause garden path sentences (e.g., The horse raced past the barn fell) are notoriously difficult to comprehend, even after repeated exposure [1, 2]. We present a silent eye tracking experiment showing that increasing the weight of the matrix verb phrase with a particle or an adverbial facilitates recovery from misanalysis, as in The horse raced past the barn fell (down...

Researchers in natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation (MT) in the past were mainly interested in linguistic theories, parsing and generation. They discussed specific types of language expressions such as garden path sentences, and did not pay much attention to problems v0hich may arise when huge volmne of real existing sentences are handled, such as newspaper articles, patent...

Descriptions. In recent years, both formal and computational linguistics have been exploiting descriptions of structures where previously the structures themselves were used. The practice started with (Marcus et al., 1983), who demonstrated the value of (syntactic) tree descriptions for near-deterministic incremental parsing. Vijay-Shankar (Vijay-Shankar and Joshi, 1988; Vijay-Shankar, 1992) us...

Computational linguistics can provide an effective perspective to explain the partial ambiguity during machine translation. The structure of V+Pron+CP/NP has the ambiguous potential to bring Garden Path effect. If Tell+Pron+NP structure has considerable higher observed frequencies than Tell+Pron+CP structure, the former is regarded as the preferred structure and has much lower confusion quotien...

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...