Relatively little is known about how linguistic structure is neurally encoded. The current study examines a relatively subtle structural manipulation: the difference between reading a list of two noun phrases (“sunlit ponds ### green umbrellas”) and their syntactic coordination (“sunlit ponds and green umbrellas”). In two ERP experiments, the presence of the coordinator resulted in an increased...

This study investigated metaphor comprehension in the broader context of task-difference effects and manipulation of processing difficulty. We predicted that right hemisphere recruitment would show greater specificity to processing difficulty rather than metaphor comprehension. Previous metaphor processing studies have established that the left inferior frontal gyrus strongly correlates with me...

Studies using tests such as digit span and nonword repetition have implicated short-term memory across a range of developmental domains. Such tests ostensibly assess specialized processes for the short-term manipulation and maintenance of information that are often argued to enable long-term learning. However, there is considerable evidence for an influence of long-term linguistic learning on p...

This paper, the 5 in a series of biennial progress reports, reviews the activities of the Linguistic Data Consortium with particular emphasis on general trends in the language resource landscape and on changes that distinguish the two years since LDC’s last report at LREC from the preceding 8 years. After providing a perspective on the current landscape of language resources, the paper goes on ...

In this paper we present LXGram, a general purpose grammar for the deep linguistic processing of Portuguese that delivers high precision grammatical analysis and detailed meaning representations. We present the main design features and evaluation results on the grammar’s coverage as well as its ability to produce correct grammatical analyses.

The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) has created various annotated linguistic data for a variety of common task evaluation programs and projects to create shared linguistic resources. The majority of these annotated linguistic data were created with highly customized annotation tools developed at LDC. The Annotation Graph Toolkit (AGTK) has been used as a primary infrastructure for annotation t...

To locate the underlying cause of biological gender errors of oral English pronouns by proficient Chinese-English learners, two self-paced reading experiments were conducted to explore whether the reading time for each 'he' or 'she' that matched its antecedent was shorter than that in the corresponding mismatch situation, as with native speakers of English. The critical manipulation was to see ...

In this paper we present IDEAL+, a parsing architecture for Italian, which pursues the goal of pairing robustness with deep linguistic analysis by extending a shallow processing kernel with a pool of hybrid constraints for the incremental identification of grammatical relations. The parsing output takes the form of dependency structures representing the full range of instantiated functional rel...

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of an Italian broadcast news corpus at ITC-irst, under a contract with the European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA). The corpus consists of 30 hours of recordings transcribed and annotated with conventions similar to those adopted by the Linguistic Data Consortium for the DARPA HUB-4 corpora. The corpus will be completed and rel...

This presentation reports on recent progress the Linguistic Data Consortium has made in addressing the needs of multiple research communities by collecting, annotating and distributing, simplifying access and developing standards and tools. Specifically, it describes new trends in publication, a sample of recent projects and significant improvements to LDC Online that improve access to LDC data...