Two experiments aimed at investigating how working memory capacity (WMC) related to processing wh-extractions in both a grammatical judgment and a translation task by using the Operation Span task. A self-paced paradigm was used to collect response times and accuracy rates. In Experiment 1, results showed that high WMC was related to faster grammatical judgment of the critical region in subject...

The problem of learning or inferring automata and grammars has been studied for decades and has connections to many disciplines, including bioinformatics, computational linguistics and pattern recognition. In this paper we present a short survey of basic models and techniques related to the grammatical inference and try to outline some new promising approaches which we expect to bring new light...

Subject-verb agreement is a computation that is often difficult to execute perfectly in the first language (L1) and even more difficult to produce skillfully in a second language (L2). In this study, we examined the way in which bilingual speakers complete sentence fragments in a manner that reflects access to both grammatical and conceptual number. In two experiments, we show that bilingual sp...

Implicit learning research has generally examined form-level regularities with little work being directed at learning abstract rules of the kind underlying language. We constructed an artificial analogue of French in which the verb agreed in gender with the object in object-extracted sentences but not in subject-extracted sentences. We tested whether English native speakers (n = 25) could learn...

Silverstein (1976)’s hierarchy of features and ergativity (Referential Hierarchy) was proposed to capture apparent systematic variation with respect to word-class (pronouns versus nouns) in the expression of the grammatical functions Subject and Object and the semantic roles Agent and Undergoer linked to these functions. An assumption of the original hierarchy was obligatoriness of marking, rat...

Web count statistics gathered from search engines have been widely used as a resource in a variety of NLP tasks. For some tasks, however, the information they exploit is not fine-grained enough. We propose an inverted index over grammatical relations as a fast and reliable resource to access more general and also more detailed frequency information. To build the index, we use a dependency parse...

Pronoun interpretation in English has been demonstrated to be sensitive to an interaction between grammatical and pragmatically-driven factors. This study investigated the interpretation of pronouns in Japanese, which has both null and overt forms. Thirty-two native speakers of Japanese participated in a passage completion experiment with transfer-of-possession contexts, varying prompt type, as...

The aim of the present fMRI study was to investigate the neural circuits of two stages of grammatical encoding in sentence production. Participants covertly produced sentences on the basis of three words (one verb and two nouns). In the functional level condition both nouns were animate and so were potential competitors for the grammatical function of subject. In the positional level condition ...

Statistical machine translation systems often struggle to preserve predicateargument structure. We present a new hierarchical machine translation model that explicitly captures the grammatical roles taken on by the words and phrases being translated (e.g., subject, object, and indirect object). Although existing hierarchical and syntax-based grammars can capture how many arguments a predicate t...

“Case” and “grammatical function” are central to syntactic theories, but rigorous treatments of these notions in surface-oriented grammars like Dynamic Syntax (DS) are pending. Within DS, it is simply held that a case particle resolves structural uncertainty (i.e., unfixed node) in the course of incremental tree update. We model the relation between “case” and “grammatical function” with specia...