The development of models of human sentence processing has traditionally followed one of two paths. Either the model posited a sequence of processing modules, each with its own task-specific knowledge (e.g., syntax and semantics), or it posited a single processor utilizing different types of knowledge inextricably integrated into a monolithic knowledge base. Our previous work in modeling the se...

Aphasic patients who exhibit “asyntactic comprehension” show poor performance o n a sentence-picture matching task with semantically unconstrained sentences, such as “The cow bit the horse,” but good performance when the sentences are semantically constrained, such as “The boy threw the ball.” The assumption has been that such patients are able to interpret these latter sentences by relying sol...

Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge understanding how word learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions which multiple static semantic representations linked single form, fails capture important generalizations about polysemous u...

Analyzing the semantic representations of 10000 Chinese sentences and describing a new sentence analysis method that evaluates semantic preference knowledge, we create a model of semantic representation analysis based on the correspondence between lexical meanings and conceptual structures, and relations that underlie those lexical meanings. We also propose a semantical argument-head relation t...

One difference between natural and formal languages is that natural languages are ambiguous in many respects, one of them being the ambiguity of sentences with more than one logic operator. In this paper we focus on sentences containing negation and modal operators and their interpretation by 4and 5-years old. In many cases, a sentence with multiple operators is ambiguous and grammars of human ...

What is a language? Something which assigns meanings to certain strings of types of sounds or of marks. It could therefore be a function, a set of ordered pairs of strings and meanings. The entities in the domain of the function are certain finite sequences of types of vocal sounds, or of types of inscribable marks; if CJ is in the domain of a language£, let us call CJ a sentence of£. The entit...

The present study was designed to examine the inhibitory processes of spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones during sentence comprehension, by using a cross-modal naming experiment. In this experiment, listeners were asked to name aloud a visual probe as fast as they could after hearing a sentence, which ended with a spoken Chinese homophone. Results confirm that preceding sentential con...