Sentence Processing

Important terms/ concepts pertaining to comprehension, discourse and sentence processing Models of sentence parsing Second Language Sentence Comprehension

Group Members: Wan Ning / Ain / Melissa / Wan Ting

 Sentence processing looks at: - How people understand speech ay the sentence level - The question of how listeners rapidly decipher the structure of sentences and gain access to the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

 One of the most striking features of connected speech is the rapid rate at which it ordinarily arrives. Average of daily conversation is 140-180 words per minute; Newsreader with prepared script can easily exceed 210wpm. Besides rapidity of natural speech, listeners also face problem of individual words which run in together.

Structural Properties of Sentences

Our ability to systematically make use of structure in natural language enable us to process speech rapidly. Structure of language: sets of rules that tells us how words strung together can form a sentence and convey meaning. A speaker doesnt have to ponder the issue of whether to make the recipient of give an indirect object or an oblique object. -Levelt (1989)

 Eg: (i) John gave Mary the book. (indirect obj) (ii) John gave the book to Mary. (oblique obj) These automatic processes over which we exert little conscious control.

 Noun-Verb-Noun In action: First noun verbed second noun. (i) The student read the book. (ii) The teacher graded the test. (iii) The teacher heard the student. Real-world knowledge can supply constraints that operate as part of the structure of our language.

 These properties of language give rise to regularities in the language that make possible a degree of statistical prediction whenever we listen to natural speech. Some words are more predictable than others, even out of context. You could thought of the next word, or at least say the part of speech the next word might be. Eg: The train pulled into the ..

Syntactic Processing
Syntactic Resolution is Necessary for Comprehension. Although the statistical properties of language say about the consequences of the speakers and listeners knowledge of lang.structure, they do not themselves explain this structure. In 1960s, some researchers attempted to use transformational grammar to fulfill this goal. Surface structure vs Deep structure; Competence vs Performance.

1. Surface structure vs Deep structure

Surface structure: The words you actually hear spoken or read:

the specific words we chose to convey the meaning we wish to say.

The listener must decode this surface structure to discover

the meaning that underlies the utterance (deep structure)

Eg: A. Diff. surface structures, same deep structure. (i) The boy threw the ball. (ii) The ball was thrown by the boy. B. Same surface structure, diff. deep structures. Flying planes can be dangerous.

 Distinction btw. Surface structures and deep structures tells us that sentence processing is conducted in two steps: - Listeners analyze the surface structure; - and use the information to detect the deep structure. The latter steps conveys the meaning of the sentence that is the primary goal of the communicator (Fador, Bever&

Garrette, 1974)

2. Competence Versus Performance The way people produce language is not equivalent to their knowledge of language. Much of what we say consists of incomplete fragments that do not even approach a grammatical sentence (Goldman-Eisler, 1986) Language Competence: what the speakers know about the structure of the language. Performance: Explanation of how we understand speech, however

incomplete and fragmentary it may be.

Theory of sentence processing should take both into account.

Syntactic Structure of Sentences In order to understand a sentence, the listener or reader must determine its syntactic structure. Assignment of words in a sentence to their relevant linguistic categories is called: parsing a sentence.

 Example: The boy threw the ball. (NP) (VP) The sentence are formed by two major phrases and different units. (Det, Noun, Verb)

Clausal Processing
One way the perceptual system can reduce the processing load is to break up incoming sentences into their constituent clauses. Eg. I was going to take a train to New York, but I decided it would be too heavy. Processing this sentence requires at least three operations: (i) take in and analyze the first clause, and temporary stored in the memory (ii) we analyze the second clause (iii) we retrieve the stored memory of first clause and integrate it with the second one. At this point we realize it is funny.

 This sense of processing speech by clauses are not restricted to spoken language only. Readers are also sensitive to boundaries btw. linguistic clauses.

Information that is used in sentence comprehension

What sources of information do people use in processing sentences? Syntactic structure Word frequency Plausibility (1) The dog bit the man. (2) The man bit the dog. Discourse context Syntactic complexity Intonational information

3. Plausibility of the resulting linguistic expression, in the world Unambiguous examples: The dog bit the boy. vs. The boy bit the dog. Ambiguity: (Trueswell, Tanenhaus & Garnsey, 1994) The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable. The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.

4. Context (Crain & Steedman, 1985; Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Tanenhaus et al., 1995) Ambiguity: There were two defendants, one of whom the lawyer ignored entirely, and the other of whom the lawyer interrogated for two hours. The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.

5. Intonational Information (prosodic factors) Prosody is a general term for the variety of acoustic featureswhat we hear- that ordinarily accompany a spoken sentence. One prosodic feature is the intonation pattern.

Intonation refers to the pitch changes over time Eg. when a speakers voice rises in pitch at the end of a question, or drops at the end of a sentence.

 Prosody plays numerous important roles in language processing. -indicate the mood of a speaker. -mark the semantic focus of a sentence. -disambiguate the meaning of an otherwise ambiguous sentence.

Parsing
The dog bites the man The man bites the dog Dog the bites the man All sentences have the same words, but not all of them are possible manifestations of sentences in English

 Because language is productive, we can create new and novel sentences that are never heard before These new utterances are bound by grammatical rules Therefore it is impossible for us to store meanings of all possible sentences in memory

 Hence we parse sentences to understand them. Parsing: discovering how words can be combined in a sentence, bound by grammatical rules A parser will parse a sentence to understand its meaning

 Sentence parsing may face issues, such as ambiguity, thus there are parsing strategies and models proposed by researchers as to how we process sentences.

AMBIGUITY

LEXICAL AMBIGUITY

SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY

LOCAL AMBIGUITY

STANDING AMBIGUITY

Lexical Ambiguity
when a word has more than one generally accepted meaning. Lexical ambiguity stems from the existence of homophony and polysemy. Homophony occurs when a single word has more than one meaning. Some other examples of homophony are: The word tin This can is made of tin - (a low-melting, metallic element nearly approaching silver in colour; used in plating and making alloys and tinfoil) Put the left-overs in the cookie tin. - (other word for can used in the U.S; an airtight sealed container of thin sheet metal coated with tin; used for preserving and storing food or drink)

 Polysemy occurs when a word, or small group of words, has two or more related meanings. This may sound a lot like homophony, and it is true that they are related. However, polysemy involves close relations between meanings of a single word, where homophony may involve completely different meanings. Some example of polysemy are: The verb to glare The sun glared down from the hot desert sky. The angry girl glared at the boy who had pulled her hair.

Syntactic Ambiguity
Refers to cases where clause or sentence may have more than one interpretation given the potential grammatical functions of the individual words.

Local Ambiguity
Refers to cases where the syntactic function of a word, or how to parse a sentence, remains temporarily ambiguous until it is later clarified as we hear more sentence. (Frazier& Rayner,1989) The ambiguity is referred to as local ambiguity because our uncertainty about the structure is only temporary.

Example of Local Ambiguity

When Fred passes the ball, it always gets to its target.
The sentence is temporarily ambiguous when we hear the noun phrase, the ball The phrase the ball can carry different syntactic structure: When Fred passes, the ball always gets to its target.

Standing Ambiguity
Also known as global ambiguity. A sentence ambiguity that is not resolved, typically, within the sentence, but only through using information from the context. Refers to cases where sentences remain syntactically ambiguous even when all of the lexical information has been received.

Example of Standing Ambiguity

The old books and magazines were on the bench.
It is not clear whether there should be a boundary after books (the books were old, but the magazines may not have been), or whether the boundary should follow magazines (making it clear that both the books and magazines were old)

Other example
The spy watched the man with the binoculars.
This is a standing ambiguity because without further information it is not clear who holds the binoculars - the spy or the man.

Parsing strategies
Top-down processing Bottom-up processing

Top-down processing
Top-down processing suggests that we form our perceptions starting with a larger object, concept, or idea before working our way toward more detailed information. In other words, topdown processing happens when we work from the general to the specific; the big picture to the tiny details.

Example

Bottom-up processing
Bottom-up processing is also known as 'small chunk' processing. In psycholinguistics, a bottom-up processor is a person who understands concepts and ideas by starting with details, and working their way up to the main idea of overall concept.

Example

Sentence Parsing Models

The old man the boats Initially, we would consider the old man as a phrase After realizing that the sentence would not make sense, a new interpretation will be made Garden path model- we backtrack and reinterpret Constraint satisfaction model- we have a main conscious interpretation and subconscious alternative interpretations

Garden path model

Parser makes only one syntactic analysis Analysis based on several principles, primarily: - Late closure principle - Minimal attachment principle If parsing error occurs, the parser will go back to the sentence and reinterpret it

Late closure principle

Parsers hold off establishing a major clause boundary until the latest point possible Because Jay always jogs a mile seems like a short distance. Without punctuation, readers will tend to assume that the clause boundary occurs after mile instead of jogs

Late closure principle

Hence it is easier to understand the late closure variation of the sentence, as compared to the previous sentence Because Jay always jogs a mile this seems like a short distance to him Principle is based on the idea that parsers will attach all incoming material to the phrase currently being processed (Fraiser, 1987)

Minimal attachment model

Parser will attempt to interpret sentences in the simplest syntactic structure that is consistent with the input Using the fewest phrase-structure nodes consistent with input The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi

Minimal attachment model

The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi

Arguments against the model

Factors such as semantic context may override minimal attachment and late closure principles The witness examined by the lawyer was useless The evidence examined by the lawyer was useless Minimal attachment principle will indicate that both sentences will be processed in the same way However, reading times are faster for the second sentence

Arguments against the model

A constraint is imposed on the verb examined because the word evidence is an inanimate object Hence the second sentence is easier to process for it is not ambiguous as to what is being examined

Constraint satisfaction model

More than 1 syntactic analysis of a word sequence may be generated during comprehension The old man the boats Noun phrase interpretation of the old man Alternative interpretation of man as a verb also activates, but at a level below conscious awareness

Constraint satisfaction model

Upon discovery of the parsing error, the alternative interpretation is then activated at a conscious level Does not suggest that all possible interpretations are activated automatically Assumes that nonsyntactic information such as semantic context and expectancies influence the likelihood of alternative interpretation being generated

Dependency Locality theory

Gibson, 2000, believes that the Minimal Attachment Principle to be flawed in certain aspects and proposes this theory He claims that the minimal attachment principle can only be applied to ambiguous sentences, DLT can be applied to both ambiguous and non-ambiguous sentences

DLT
Gibson bases his theory on two key insights Resources are required for storage and integration Structural integration complexity depends on distance and locality between elements being integrated

Syntactic resource and integration

Storage for structures built thus far Integration of current word into structure The complexity of integration depends on the distance between the elements being integrated

 Integration of h2 to h1 would be affected by the interference of elements between them and the possibility of h1 having already decayed by the time h2 is received as input

Locality effects
Gibson (1998) used object-extracted relative clause and subject-relative clause experiments to determine the effects of locality and reading times He has formed a simplified way to calculate the cost of integrating elements, whereby distance and complexity will increase the cost Integration cost translates to processing power

Other factors that affect dependency distances

Heaviness (Bever, 1970 and Hawkins, 1994) Heavier constituent placed at the end of the sentence makes it easier to process I gave [ the beautiful green pendant that's been in the jewellery store window for weeks ] [ to my mother ] I gave [ my mother ] [ the beautiful green pendant that's been in the jewellery store window for weeks]

Nested clauses
Nesting complexity Embedded clauses causes more incomplete dependencies to manifest Target word does not arrive immediately as the next word, thus parser needs to hold on to multiple incomplete dependencies Costs more processing power

 The owner disliked the renter The owner [who Mike has argued with] disliked the renter The owner [who Mike(who is friends with Nick) has argued with] disliked the renter Nick is friends with Mike [who argued with the owner (who disliked the renter)]

Null context
Based on the nested pronoun generalization by Bever (1974) and Kac (1981) The reporter who the senator who you met attacked disliked the editor The reported who the senator who John met attacked disliked the editor Based on DLT, John is a new NP, whereas you is a pronoun that already has a referent

 This would mean that the sentence with John would require more integration cost and storage cost due to the new noun John being introduced in the sentence Whereas you is a null context

Gaps in DLT
Although it is a convincing theory, not much research has been done to support it Most studies have been conducted by Gibson himself The calculation for energy units needed to process/parse the sentence is simplified and has not much supporting researches as well

Second Language Sentence Comprehension

Papadopoulou & Clahsen (2003), in their paper Parsing Strategies in L1 and L2 Sentences Processing: A Study of relative clause attachment in Greek said that the previous second language (L2) acquisition studies have focused on linguistic knowledge in language learners. Therefore, relatively little is known about the strategies L2 learners employ to process sentences in real time.
They also stated that it was surprising that the question of how language learners process the target language has received little attention in the past, given that a learners ability to process an input string appears to be a crucial prerequisite for the acquisition of linguistic knowledge.

 According to Peirce (2011), an important research question in the field of second language acquisition is whether it is possible for non-native speakers to acquire native-like processing abilities in their second language, and if not, what types of limitations prevent them from doing so.

Second Language Sentence Comprehension (Jackson & Dussias, 2008)

When facing written language, second language readers face many uncertainties about how people and objects are connected to one another. A factor that may complicate the comprehension of sentences in a second language (L2) is that speakers bring to the task a fully developed grammatical system and set of processing strategies from their first language (L1). Although the computation of sentence structure may be facilitated when the information needed to perform syntactic processing is the same in the L1 and L2, learners may encounter difficulties when the correct interpretation of a sentence is linked to the application of information specific to the L2.

Second Language Sentence Processing Research (Jackson & Dussias, 2008)

Processing of L2-specific information Studies involving the manipulation of a verbs argument structure has become the key source of evidence indicating processing similarities between native and second language speakers For example: Every time the dog obeyed the pretty girl showed her approval

In English, the verb obey is a transitive verb. Therefore, it is ambiguous whether the Noun Phrase (NP) the pretty girl is the object of the verb obeyed or the subject of the ensuing clause.

 In French, this syntactic ambiguity does not exist because the French equivalent of obey must be interpreted as an intransitive verb. Eye-movement records from both English and French groups failed to show any qualitative differences between the native and second language speakers at the point of disambiguation, indicating that L2 speakers were able to activate the correct lexical representation of the L2 verbs, even when these lexical representations were different in each language.

References
1. Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Miyashita, Y., Marantz, A., & O'Neil, W. (Eds.), Image, language, brain (pp. 95-126), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2. Jackson, C.N. & Dussias, P.E. (2008). Cross-linguistic differences and their impact on L2 sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(1), 65-82. 3. Papadopoulou & Clahsen (2003). Parsing Strategies in L1 and L2 Sentence Processing: A Study of relative clause attachment in Greek. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 501-528. 4. Peirce, G.M. (2011). Sentence Processing by Native and Non-Native Language Speakers. University of Pittsburgh

Questions

Group 1
I put the cat on the table into a basket Explain why the sentence may cause parsing errors to readers using the Garden Path model.

Group 2
Describe the constraint satisfaction model and how it differs from the garden path model. Provide an example of an ambiguous sentence that has not been given throughout the presentation.

Group 4
The top half of the military must be very army. What type of ambiguity does the sentence above contain? How does this affect sentence processing and why would readers parse the sentence differently?