Sentence Processing


Notes:

Sentence processing is the process of analyzing and interpreting the structure and meaning of a sentence in natural language. It is a key task in natural language processing (NLP) and is used in a variety of applications, including language translation, text summarization, and dialog systems.

There are a variety of techniques and algorithms that can be used for sentence processing, including rule-based approaches that use pre-defined rules or patterns to analyze the structure and meaning of a sentence, and machine learning-based approaches that use training data to learn to analyze sentences automatically.

In a dialog system, sentence processing is used to analyze and interpret the user’s input and to generate an appropriate response. This typically involves breaking the sentence down into its individual components (such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives), identifying the relationships between these components, and using this information to understand the meaning and intent of the sentence.

Syntactic sentence processing is the process of analyzing and interpreting the structure or syntax of a sentence in natural language. Syntactic processing involves identifying the individual components of a sentence (such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives), understanding the relationships between these components, and using this information to understand the overall structure and meaning of the sentence.

Syntactic processing is a key task in natural language processing (NLP) and is used in a variety of applications, including language translation, text summarization, and dialog systems. There are a variety of techniques and algorithms that can be used for syntactic processing, including rule-based approaches that use pre-defined rules or patterns to analyze the structure of a sentence, and machine learning-based approaches that use training data to learn to analyze sentences automatically.

In a dialog system, syntactic processing is used to analyze and interpret the user’s input and to generate an appropriate response. This typically involves breaking the sentence down into its individual components, identifying the relationships between these components, and using this information to understand the meaning and intent of the sentence.

Semantic sentence processing is the process of analyzing and interpreting the meaning of a sentence in natural language. Semantic processing involves understanding the meanings of the individual words and phrases in a sentence, as well as the relationships between these words and phrases, and using this information to understand the overall meaning and intent of the sentence.

Semantic processing is a key task in natural language processing (NLP) and is used in a variety of applications, including language translation, text summarization, and dialog systems. There are a variety of techniques and algorithms that can be used for semantic processing, including rule-based approaches that use pre-defined rules or patterns to analyze the meaning of a sentence, and machine learning-based approaches that use training data to learn to analyze sentences automatically.

In a dialog system, semantic processing is used to analyze and interpret the user’s input and to generate an appropriate response. This typically involves understanding the meaning of the individual words and phrases in the sentence, as well as the overall meaning and intent of the sentence, and using this information to generate a response that is relevant and appropriate.

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought or idea. In written language, a sentence typically begins with a capital letter and ends with a punctuation mark, such as a period, exclamation point, or question mark.

In order to be considered a sentence, a group of words must contain a subject (the thing or person the sentence is about) and a verb (an action or state of being). A sentence may also contain additional words, such as adjectives (words that describe the subject) and adverbs (words that describe the verb), as well as objects (the thing that the verb is being done to).

For example, the following are all sentences:

  • “I went to the store.” (subject: “I”; verb: “went”)
  • “The cat slept on the couch.” (subject: “cat”; verb: “slept”)
  • “She sings beautifully.” (subject: “She”; verb: “sings”)

Sentences are an essential building block of language, and they play a key role in communication and expression. In written language, sentences are used to convey meaning and convey ideas, while in spoken language, they are used to convey meaning and express emotions.

Wikipedia:

See also:

Sentence Processing


Computational models of retrieval processes in sentence processing
S Vasishth, B Nicenboim, F Engelmann… – Trends in Cognitive …, 2019 – Elsevier
Sentence comprehension requires that the comprehender work out who did what to whom. This process has been characterized as retrieval from memory. This review summarizes the quantitative predictions and empirical coverage of the two existing computational models of …

Lossy?context surprisal: An information?theoretic model of memory effects in sentence processing
R Futrell, E Gibson, RP Levy – Cognitive science, 2020 – Wiley Online Library
A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation?based …

Comparing Transformers and RNNs on predicting human sentence processing data
D Merkx, SL Frank – arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.09471, 2020 – arxiv.org
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have long been an architecture of interest for computational models of human sentence processing. The more recently introduced Transformer architecture has been shown to outperform recurrent neural networks on many …

Gene expression correlates of the cortical network underlying sentence processing
XZ Kong, N Tzourio-Mazoyer, M Joliot… – Neurobiology of …, 2020 – MIT Press
A pivotal question in modern neuroscience is which genes regulate brain circuits that underlie cognitive functions. However, the field is still in its infancy. Here we report an integrated investigation of the high-level language network (ie, sentence-processing  …

Time-course of motor involvement in literal and metaphoric action sentence processing: A TMS study
M Reilly, O Howerton, RH Desai – Frontiers in Psychology, 2019 – frontiersin.org
There is evidence that the motor cortex is involved in reading sentences containing an action verb (” The lengthy spike was hammered into the ground”) as well as metaphoric sentences (” The weak army was hammered again in battle”). Verbs such as’ hammered’may …

Verbing nouns and nouning verbs: Using a balanced design provides ERP evidence against “syntax-first” approaches to sentence processing
LA Fromont, K Steinhauer, P Royle – PloS one, 2020 – journals.plos.org
In this event-related potential (ERP) study we reevaluate syntax-first approaches to sentence processing by implementing a novel paradigm in French that includes correct sentences, pure syntactic category violations, lexical-semantic anomalies, and combined anomalies …

No language unification without neural feedback: How awareness affects sentence processing
V Mongelli, EL Meijs, S Van Gaal, P Hagoort – NeuroImage, 2019 – Elsevier
How does the human brain combine a finite number of words to form an infinite variety of sentences? According to the Memory, Unification and Control (MUC) model, sentence processing requires long-range feedback from the left inferior frontal cortex (LIFC) to left …

Developmental differences in the neural correlates supporting semantics and syntax during sentence processing
JM Schneider, MJ Maguire – Developmental science, 2019 – Wiley Online Library
School?aged and adolescent children continue to demonstrate improvements in how they integrate and comprehend real?time, auditory language over this developmental time period, which can have important implications for academic and social success. To better …

Adult age differences in the benefit of syntactic and semantic constraints for sentence processing.
C Beese, M Werkle-Bergner, U Lindenberger… – Psychology and …, 2019 – psycnet.apa.org
Verbal working memory-intensive sentence processing declines with age. This might reflect older adults’ difficulties with reducing the memory load by grouping single words into multiword chunks. Here we used a serial order task emphasizing syntactic and semantic …

Toward Computational Models of Multilingual Sentence Processing
SL Frank – Language Learning, 2019 – Wiley Online Library
Although computational models can simulate aspects of human sentence processing, research on this topic has remained almost exclusively limited to the single language case. The current review presents an overview of the state of the art in computational cognitive …

Age differences in the effect of animacy on Mandarin sentence processing
X Liu, W Wang, H Wang – PeerJ, 2019 – peerj.com
Animate nouns are preferred for grammatical subjects, whereas inanimate nouns are preferred for grammatical objects. Animacy provides important semantic cues for sentence comprehension. However, how individuals’ ability to use this animacy cue changes with …

Cross-linguistic effects of subjecthood, case, and transitivity in syntax and sentence processing
R Tollan – 2019 – tlpl.ling.utoronto.ca
The definition of a grammatical ‘subject’, and the properties an argument must have to be characterized as a subject is long debated (eg, Comrie, 1975; Keenan, 1976). This thesis investigates the relationship between subjecthood, case marking, and transitivity, from both …

Comparing gated and simple recurrent neural network architectures as models of human sentence processing
C Aurnhammer, SL Frank – 2019 – repository.ubn.ru.nl
Abstract The Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) has a long tradition in cognitive models of language processing. More recently, gated recurrent networks have been proposed that often outperform the SRN on natural language processing tasks. Here, we investigate …

Verb and sentence processing patterns in healthy Italian participants: Insight from the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS)
E Barbieri, I Brambilla, CK Thompson… – Journal of communication …, 2019 – Elsevier
We developed an Italian version of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS, Thompson, 2011), a test assessing verb and sentence deficits typically found in aphasia, by focusing on verb-argument structure and syntactic complexity effects, rarely …

Comprehension of the copula: preschoolers (and sometimes adults) ignore subject–verb agreement during sentence processing
B Davies, NX Rattanasone, K Demuth – Journal of child language, 2020 – cambridge.org
Subject–verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns (The sheep is/are fat), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced …

Using Approximate Bayesian Computation for estimating parameters in the cue-based retrieval model of sentence processing
S Vasishth – MethodsX, 2020 – Elsevier
ABSTRACT A commonly used approach to parameter estimation in computational models is the so-called grid search procedure: the entire parameter space is searched in small steps to determine the parameter value that provides the best fit to the observed data. This …

L2 Prediction during complex sentence processing
E Chun, E Kaan – Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 2019 – Springer
Recent studies have found that proficient second language (L2) listeners are able to predict upcoming linguistic information to the same extent as first language (L1) listeners during simple sentence processing, particularly when semantic cues are given and/or few cognitive …

I see what you meant to say: Anticipating speech errors during online sentence processing.
MW Lowder, F Ferreira – Journal of Experimental Psychology …, 2019 – psycnet.apa.org
Everyday speech is rife with errors and disfluencies, yet processing what we hear usually feels effortless. How does the language comprehension system accomplish such an impressive feat? The current experiment tests the hypothesis that listeners draw on relevant …

Prepositions as a hybrid between lexical and functional category: Evidence from an ERP study on German sentence processing
M Chanturidze, R Carroll, E Ruigendijk – Journal of Neurolinguistics, 2019 – Elsevier
In syntactic theories of word categorization the status of prepositions as belonging to either a lexical (eg, nouns, verbs) or a functional category (eg, determiners, complementizers) is under debate. It has also been suggested that prepositions are a hybrid between the two …

Auditory sentence processing in bilinguals: The role of cognitive control
N Akhavan, HK Blumenfeld, T Love – Frontiers in Psychology, 2020 – ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
A number of research studies have shown that the unique need in bilinguals to manage both of their languages positively impacts their cognitive control processes. Yet, due to a dearth of studies at the sentence level, it is still unclear if this benefit extends to sentence processing …

Syntactic and Semantic Specialization and Integration in 5-to 6-Year-Old Children during Auditory Sentence Processing
J Wang, ML Rice, JR Booth – Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2020 – MIT Press
Previous studies have found specialized syntactic and semantic processes in the adult brain during language comprehension. Young children have sophisticated semantic and syntactic aspects of language, yet many previous fMRI studies failed to detect this specialization …

A ‘no’with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing
EJ Darley, C Kent, N Kazanina – Cognition, 2020 – Elsevier
There is strong evidence that comprehenders can parse sentences in an incremental fashion. However, when the sentence contains a negation, the evidence is less clear. Previous work has shown that increasing the pragmatic felicity of a negative sentence …

Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing: Evidence from subject-verb agreement in German
J Reifegerste, R Jarvis, C Felser – Journal of Memory and Language, 2020 – Elsevier
While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of …

The Effect of Distance on Sentence Processing by Older Adults
X Liu, W WANG – Frontiers in Psychology, 2019 – frontiersin.org
In sentences with long-distance dependency relations (‘The man whom the police arrested is thin’), there are two kinds of distance between the gap (object position of arrested) and the filler man: linear (the intervening words in linear order); and structural (the intervening nodes …

A preliminary investigation of dispositional affect, the P300, and sentence processing
J Selvanayagam, V Witte, LA Schmidt, VD Dwivedi – Brain research, 2019 – Elsevier
We examined whether dispositional affect modulated the relation between sentence processing and the P300 Event Related Potential (ERP) component. We used sentence stimuli from our previous study, where sentences started with subject nouns that were …

Cognitive models of syntax and sentence processing
V Demberg, F Keller – … Language: From Genes and Brains to …, 2019 – homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk
Cognitive models of sentence processing implement cognitive processing theories. They should hence display the same processing difficulties as humans and be able to predict processing ease where humans experience processing ease. This is usually not the case for …

Reanalysing object gaps during non-native sentence processing: Evidence from ERPs
A Jessen, C Felser – Second Language Research, 2019 – journals.sagepub.com
The present study used event related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how native (L1) German-speaking second-language (L2) learners of English process sentences containing filler-gap dependencies such as Bill liked the house (women) that Bob built some ornaments …

Reading Comprehension and Predictability Effects on Sentence Processing: An Event?Related Potential Study
ÁJ Tabullo, D Shalom, Y Sevilla… – Mind, Brain, and …, 2020 – Wiley Online Library
Electrophysiology studies have identified two event?related potentials that are modulated by predictive processes during language comprehension: the N400 and a frontal positivity. The N400 is smaller when words are presented within highly restrictive sentences, indicating …

What you say versus how you say it: Comparing sentence comprehension and emotional prosody processing using fMRI
A Seydell-Greenwald, CE Chambers, K Ferrara… – NeuroImage, 2020 – Elsevier
… activations. • Emotional prosody and sentence processing activations partly mirror one another. Abstract. While … contrast. (3) Is prosody processing activation as right-lateralized as sentence processing activation is left-lateralized? If …

Enhanced left inferior frontal to left superior temporal effective connectivity for complex sentence comprehension: fMRI evidence from Chinese relative clause …
K Xu, DH Wu, JR Duann – Brain and language, 2020 – Elsevier
… Keywords. Relative clause. Sentence processing. Sentence complexity. Effective connectivity. 1. Introduction. Relative clause (RC), which can be used to produce sentences with the embedded structure in natural languages, has attracted much attention in psycholinguistics …

Mini Pinyin: a modified miniature language for studying language learning and incremental sentence processing
ZR Cross, L Zou-Williams, E Wilkinson, M Schlesewsky… – 2020 – psyarxiv.com
Artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigms are used extensively in psycholinguistics and the cognitive neuroscience of language to characterise the (neuro-) cognitive basis of language learning. However, despite their effectiveness in characterising the (non-) human …

Compensation for French Liquid Deletion During Auditory Sentence Processing.
S Peperkamp, AMI Zurita – INTERSPEECH, 2019 – lscp.net
Phonological rules change the surface realization of words. Listeners undo these changes in order to retrieve the canonical word form. We investigate this so-called compensation for a French deletion rule, ie liquid deletion. This rule optionally deletes the final consonant of a …

Language Comprehension In The Social Brain: Electrophysiological Brain Signals Of Social Presence Effects During Syntactic And Semantic Sentence Processing
C Hinchcliffe, L Jiménez-Ortega, F Muñoz… – Cortex, 2020 – Elsevier
Although, evolutionarily, language emerged predominantly for social purposes, much has yet to be uncovered regarding how language processing is affected by social context. Social presence research studies the ways in which the presence of a conspecific affects …

Event?related brain potentials reveal how multiple aspects of semantic processing unfold across parafoveal and foveal vision during sentence reading
BR Payne, MC Stites, KD Federmeier – Psychophysiology, 2019 – Wiley Online Library
… psyp.13432. Cited by: 2. Funding information: National Institutes of Health grant (AG026308) (to KDF). Portions of this research were presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing …

Supramodal sentence processing in the human brain: fMRI evidence for the influence of syntactic complexity in more than 200 participants
J Uddén, A Hultén, JM Schoffelen, N Lam, K Harbusch… – BioRxiv, 2019 – biorxiv.org
This study investigated two questions. One is to which degree sentence processing beyond single words is independent of the input modality (speech vs. reading). The second question is which parts of the network recruited by both modalities is sensitive to syntactic complexity …

Backward-looking sentence processing in typically disfluent versus stuttered speech: ERP evidence
ND Maxfield, F Ferreira – Language, cognition and neuroscience, 2019 – Taylor & Francis
The aim was to determine how backward-looking sentence processing is affected by typically disfluent versus stuttered speech. Two listener groups heard Garden Path (GP) and control sentences. GP sentences contained no disfluency, a silent pause, or a filled pause …

Semantic attraction in sentence processing
A Laurinavichyute, T von der Malsburg – 2020 – psyarxiv.com
Agreement attraction is the well-documented, cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as would be required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun that happens to match the verb’s relevant morphosyntactic features (‘The …

Diathesis alternations and selectional restrictions in sentence processing: A fMRI study
S Bhattasali, J Hale – Proceedings of the 55th Meeting of the …, 2019 – conf.ling.cornell.edu
Page 1. Diathesis Alternations and Selectional Restrictions in Sentence Processing: A fMRI Study Shohini Bhattasali Cornell University John Hale University of Georgia !1 55th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 55) May 17, 2019 Page 2. Introduction … Language, Cognition and …

Processing gender agreement errors in pleasant and unpleasant words: An ERP study at the sentence level
I Padrón, I Fraga, C Acuña-Fariña – Neuroscience Letters, 2020 – Elsevier
… Under a Creative Commons license. open access. Highlights. • In this study we explore the influence of affective valence on the detection of gender agreement errors in sentence processing. • Unpleasant adjectives evoked an emotional effect in the LAN/N400 ms time window. • …

Gene expression correlates of the cortical network underlying sentence processing
XZ Kong, N Tzourio-Mazoyer, M Joliot, E Fedorenko… – bioRxiv, 2019 – biorxiv.org
A pivotal question in modern neuroscience is which genes regulate brain circuits that underlie cognitive functions. However, the field is still in its infancy. Here we report an integrated investigation of the high-level language network (ie, sentence processing  …

Enhanced sentence processing abilities among congenitally blind adults
R Loiotile, A Omaki, M Bedny – 2019 – psyarxiv.com
Sensory loss, such as blindness, is associated with selective improvements in intact senses and repurposing of deafferented “visual” cortex for non-visual functions. Areas within “visual” cortex are active during language tasks and show sensitivity to grammar in congenitally …

Interference control in bilingual auditory sentence processing in noise
J Kim, K Marton, L Obler, I Sekerina… – … and insights. John …, 2019 – books.google.com
Listening to speech in the presence of interfering auditory stimuli is a well-studied phenomenon in second language (L2) listeners. L2 auditory processing has been associated with various individual factors, such as listeners’ L2 linguistic and contextual …

Teach your robot your language! trainable neural parser for modelling human sentence processing: Examples for 15 languages
X Hinaut, J Twiefel – IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and …, 2019 – ieeexplore.ieee.org
We present a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that performs thematic role assignment and can be used for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The RNN is trained to map sentence structures to meanings (eg predicates). Previously, we have shown that the model is able to …

Visual attention-capture cue in depicted scenes fails to modulate online sentence processing
J Burmester, K Spalek, I Wartenburger – Dialogue & Discourse, 2019 – dad.uni-bielefeld.de
Everyday communication is enriched by the visual environment that listeners concomitantly link to the linguistic input. If and when visual cues are integrated into the mental meaning representation of the communicative setting, is still unclear. In our earlier findings, the …

How Animacy and Verbal Information Influence V2 Sentence Processing: Evidence from Eye Movements
P De Swart, G Van Bergen – Open Linguistics, 2019 – degruyter.com
There exists a clear association between animacy and the grammatical function of transitive subject. The grammar of some languages require the transitive subject to be high in animacy, or at least higher than the object. A similar animacy preference has been observed …

L3 Sentence Processing: Language-Specific or Phenomenon-Sensitive?
M Sokolova, R Slabakova – Languages, 2019 – mdpi.com
The article investigates non-native sentence processing and examines the existing scholarly approaches to L2 processing with a population of L3 learners of English, whose native language is Russian. In a self-paced reading experiment, native speakers of Russian and …

Structure-sensitive constraints in non-native sentence processing
C Felser – Journal of the European Second Language …, 2019 – euroslajournal.org
Studies examining the real-time application of structure-sensitive constraints in second-language (L2) sentence processing have shown that depending on the type of constraint under investigation, the constraint may be more likely, equally (un) likely, or less likely to be …

Developmental Timescale of Rapid Adaptation to Conflicting Cues in Real?Time Sentence Processing
A Yazbec, MP Kaschak, A Borovsky – Cognitive science, 2019 – Wiley Online Library
Children and adults use established global knowledge to generate real?time linguistic predictions, but less is known about how listeners generate predictions in circumstances that semantically conflict with long?standing event knowledge. We explore these issues in adults …

An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
X Liu, H Wang, A Xie, X Mao – JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), 2019 – jove.com
Previous studies have found that older adults have greater difficulties in processing syntactically complex sentences than younger adults. However, the exact regions where the difficulties arise have not been fully identified. In this study, a maze task was implemented to …

Sentence processing: How words generate syntactic structures in the brain
J Martorell, P Morucci, S Mancini, N Molinaro – 2020 – psyarxiv.com
Abstract Language comprehension relies on the fundamental ability to create meaningful syntactic structures from single words during on-line processing. Time-resolved neuroimaging techniques can be used to measure electrophysiological activity revealing the …

Japanese EFL learners’ sentence processing of conceptual plurality: An analysis focusing on reciprocal verbs
Y Tamura, J Fukuta, Y Nishimura, Y Harada… – Applied …, 2019 – cambridge.org
This study aimed to investigate how Japanese learners of English as a foreign language, whose first language does not have obligatory morphological number marking, process conceptual plurality. The targeted structure was reciprocal verbs, which require conceptual …

Recovery from misinterpretations during online sentence processing
L Blott, JM Rodd, F Ferreira… – Journal of Experimental …, 2020 – discovery.ucl.ac.uk
Misinterpretations during language comprehension are common. The ability to recover from such processing difficulties is therefore crucial for successful day-to-day communication. Previous research on the recovery from misinterpretations has focused on sentences …

10 Electrophysiology of Semantic Violations and Lexical Ambiguity Resolution in Bilingual Sentence Processing
K Rataj – Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution, 2020 – books.google.com
Sentence comprehension is an integral part of everyday communication and differs considerably from the processing of word meaning in isolation. Numerous electrophysiological studies into bilingual language processing have employed tasks that …

L2 sentence processing
X Zheng, KML Lemhöfer – 2019 – repository.ubn.ru.nl
In sentences like “the mouse that chased the cat was hungry”, the syntactically correct interpretation (the mouse chases the cat) is contradicted by semantic and pragmatic knowledge. Previous research has shown that L1 speakers sometimes base sentence …

Remember they were emotional-Effects of emotional qualifiers during sentence processing
S Child, A Garnham, J Oakhill – Open Psychology, 2019 – degruyter.com
We investigated whether emotional information facilitates retrieval and whether it makes representations more salient during sentence processing. Participants were presented with sentences including entities (nouns) that were either bare, with no additional information or …

Sentence processing is modulated by the current linguistic environment and a priori information: An fMRI study
K Weber, C Micheli, E Ruigendijk… – Brain and …, 2019 – Wiley Online Library
Introduction Words are not processed in isolation but in rich contexts that are used to modulate and facilitate language comprehension. Here, we investigate distinct neural networks underlying two types of contexts, the current linguistic environment and verb …

Emojis in Sentence Processing: An Electrophysiological Approach
B Weissman – Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web …, 2019 – dl.acm.org
This paper discusses two multi-experiment studies using the ERP methodology to investigate neural correlates of processing linguistic emojis. The first study examined the use of wink emojis used to mark irony and found the same ERP response complex that has …

Individual Differences in Peripheral Hearing and Cognition Reveal Sentence Processing Differences in Healthy Older Adults
I Kurthen, M Meyer, M Schlesewsky… – bioRxiv, 2020 – biorxiv.org
When viewed cross-sectionally, aging seems to negatively affect speech comprehension. However, aging is a heterogeneous process, and variability among older adults is typically large. In this study, we investigated language comprehension as a function of individual …

A principled approach to feature selection in models of sentence processing
G Smith, S Vasishth – 2020 – psyarxiv.com
Among theories of human language comprehension, cue-based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long-distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has …

Interaction with Context During Recurrent Neural Network Sentence Processing
F Davis, M van Schijndel – 2020 – psyarxiv.com
Syntactic ambiguities in isolated sentences can lead to increased difficulty in incremental sentence processing, a phenomenon known as a garden-path effect. This difficulty, however, can be alleviated for humans when they are presented with supporting discourse …

Top-down activation of the visuo-orthographic system during spoken sentence processing
S Planton, V Chanoine, J Sein, JL Anton, B Nazarian… – NeuroImage, 2019 – Elsevier
The left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) is considered the key area of the visuo-orthographic system. However, some studies reported that the area is also involved in speech processing tasks, especially those that require activation of orthographic knowledge …

Linguistic syncopation: Alignment of musical meter to syntactic structure and its effect on sentence processing.
C Hilton, MB Goldwater – CogSci, 2019 – cogsci.mindmodeling.org
Abstract Language and music are structured at multiple temporal scales and have been characterized as having meter: a hierarchical and periodic alternation of the prominence of syllables/beats. Meter is thought to emerge from the entrainment of neural oscillators …

Adult Age Differences in On-line Sentence Processing of Korean Relative Clauses
M Kim, SR Noh – ?????, 2019 – dbpia.co.kr
The goal of this study was to investigate age-related differences in processing relative clause sentences, using a self-paced reading paradigm. In this study, we used four types of Korean relative clauses (RCs): two types of subject RCs (SS and OS) and two types of object …

The Effects of Neurocognitive Aging on Sentence Processing
C Beese – 2019 – ul.qucosa.de
Abstract (EN) Across the lifespan, successful language comprehension is crucial for continued participation in everyday life. The success of language comprehension relies on the intact functioning of both language-specific processes as well as domain-general …

Interference in Sentence Processing: The Case of Negation
I de Dios Flores – Advances in English and American Studies: current …, 2020 – aedean.org
This paper investigates different configurations of negation with the aim of studying their perceived acceptability in a speeded judgement task. Departing from negative polarity item (NPI) illusions, this research focuses on similar sentences that, instead, contain two negative …

On the Interaction Between Dependency Frequency and Semantic Fit in Sentence Processing
SH Ryu, RP Chaves – … of the Society for Computation in …, 2019 – scholarworks.umass.edu
The frequency of linguistic input is a key factor in predicting sentence processing difficulty, which motivated probabilistic models of sentence processing (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008). Another important factor is plausibility, ie semantic fit, which indicates how consistent the …

Early activation of cross-language meaning from phonology during sentence processing.
DC Friesen, O Ward, J Bohnet, P Cormier… – … memory, and cognition, 2020 – ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of …

What Language Experience Tells us about Cognition: Variable Input and Interactional Contexts Affect Bilingual Sentence Processing
PE Dussias, JR Valdés Kroff… – The Handbook of the …, 2019 – Wiley Online Library
This chapter discusses recent findings that demonstrate how variability in the linguistic experiences of bilingual speakers and in the ability of bilingual speakers to learn from these experiences, might impact bilingual language processing. It shows that linguistic experience …

The Contributions of Singular and Plural Nouns to Sentence Processing Complexity: Evidence from Reading Time
RH Messer, S Kennison – East European Journal of …, 2020 – eejpl.eenu.edu.ua
The nature of semantic representations of plural nouns has been a subject of debates in the literature. The present research investigated the extent to which there are differences in the processing of plural versus single noun descriptions (eg, the large chairs vs. the large chair) …

The influence of voice quality and multi-talker babble noise on sentence processing and recall performance in school children using cochlear implant and/or hearing …
K Jonas Brännström, H von Lochow… – Logopedics …, 2019 – Taylor & Francis
Purpose: This study examines the influence of voice quality and multi-talker babble noise on processing and storage performance in a working memory task performed by children using cochlear implants (CI) and/or hearing aids (HA). Methods: Twenty-three children with a …

Do 4-year-olds employ island constraints during sentence processing?
G Hochmuth, M Hirzel, J Lidz – 2020 – drum.lib.umd.edu
Previous research has proven that adults and children interpret and process filler-gap dependencies actively. However, in environments where a filler-gap dependency is impossible (like islands), adults no longer actively resolve filler-gap dependencies. By age …

The Varying Roles of Morphosyntax in Memory and Sentence Processing: Retrieval and Encoding Interference in Brazilian Portuguese
A Lawn – 2020 – escholarship.org
Cue-based retrieval models have largely been adopted as a description of how linguistic content is retrieved from memory. Under this framework, a retrieval cue is projected at the site of a dependency and matched with its target using a parallel matching procedure (eg …

False belief reasoning in pronoun resolution during on-line sentence processing
HF Or – ?????, 2019 – dbpia.co.kr
Theory of Mind (ToM) and language are closely related, yet few studies have examined the role of ToM during on-line sentence processing. To that end, we investigated ToM in pronoun resolution using self-paced reading. We constructed false-belief contexts where a …

The role of working memory in sentence processing in normal reading population. A review of related literature.
G Anastasia – Archives of Business Research, 2019 – 116.203.177.230
This essay aims to describe the factors that influence sentence processing with emphasis given on garden path sentences. The latter grammatical phenomenon has been proved more problematic in people with low working memory span. Predictions of the working …

Research methods for the study of real-time sentence processing by heritage speakers
J Jegerski – 2019 – su.se
Page 1. Research methods for the study of real-time sentence processing by heritage speakers Jill Jegerski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Workshop on Heritage Language Practices Stockholm University May 7, 2019 Page 2. Introduction • In experimental research on heritage …

Verbing and nouning in French: Toward an ecologically valid approach to sentence processing
LA Fromont – 2020 – papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca
The present thesis uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate neurocognitve mechanisms underlying sentence comprehension. In particular, these two experiments seek to clarify the interplay between syntactic and semantic processes in native speakers and …

Influence of L1 and L2 on L3 Sentence Processing: Evidence from Ambiguity Resolution in First, Second, and Third Language Processing
C Bai – Eruditi: The CGCS Journal of Language Research and …, 2019 – cgcs.cu-tokyo.ac.jp
This study provides a set of cross-linguistic data on the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity by Japanese (JNS), Chinese (CNS), and Mongolian native speakers (MNS) in their respective languages using a set of cross-translated sentences. We …

Equivalent current dipole source localization of deceptive response during crime-relevant sentence processing
YY Kim – ???????: ?? ? ??, 2019 – kjp-cognitive.org
We investigated event-related potential generators in the P300-based guilty knowledge test using Korean sentences, which had an ‘object-complement-verb’or a ‘subject-object-verb’structure. Twenty-six participants were divided into a guilty group and an innocent …

The effects of aging and visual noise on good-enough sentence processing
S Malyutina, E Savinova, Z Evdaeva… – … of Speech and …, 2019 – elibrary.ru
According to the good-enough model of language comprehension (Ferreira et al., 2002), we do not always perform full algorithmic analysis of linguistic input. Rather, we often form shallow and underspecified representations based on lexico-semantic heuristics. But little …

Age-related decline in sentence processing: Deriving corpus-linguistic hypotheses from psycholinguistic data
C Beese, M Werkle-Bergner, U Lindenberger… – Corpora for Language …, 2019 – pure.mpg.de
Healthy aging is associated with language changes. We here advocate the position that a strong determinant of such changes may be alterations in the underlying processing systems. Age-related processing differences of language information such as syntactic …

SEMANTIC SHORT-TERM MEMORY AND ITS ROLE IN SENTENCE PROCESSING AND LONG-TERM MEMORY
RC Martin – Cases of Amnesia: Contributions to Understanding …, 2019 – books.google.com
In 1994, you and your colleagues first discuss the case of AB who showed evidence of a short-term memory deficit for maintaining semantic information. In 1996, you reported another case, ML, who showed a similar STM pattern. Firstly, can you provide us with some …

Good-Enough Sentence Processing in Adolescents and Adults under No-Noise and Auditory-Linguistic-Noise Conditions
A Nikiforova, A Lopukhina, S Malyutina… – The Russian Journal …, 2019 – researchgate.net
According to modern syntactic theories, sentence comprehension can rely not only on grammatically driven algorithmic parsing of grammatical structure but also on good-enough processing, according to which we establish relations between words based on their …

Exploring the spatiotemporal dynamics of on-line sentence comprehension in 5-year-olds: The role of semantic context in syntactic processing and behavioral …
M Fish – 2020 – digital.lib.washington.edu
… This study aims to advance the current knowledge of sentence processing in the developing brain, and to investigate relationships between children’s language proficiency and sentence processing ability at kindergarten onset …

Parallel, cascaded, interactive processing of words during sentence reading
Y Wen, J Snell, J Grainger – Cognition, 2019 – Elsevier
… Hagoort (2003) presents the arguments in favor of an incremental-interactive theory of sentence processing based on Vosse and Kempen (2000) model of sentence parsing (see Hagoort, 2013, for neuro-cognitive extensions of this computational model) …

Processing network emojis in Chinese sentence context: An ERP study
M Tang, B Chen, X Zhao, L Zhao – Neuroscience Letters, 2020 – Elsevier
… Nigam et al. [6] found that in sentence processing, when the last … PLoS One, 13 (8) (2018), Article e0201727. Google Scholar. [26] N. Cohn, T. Roijackers, R. Schaap, J. EngelenAre emoji a poor substitute for words? Sentence processing with emoji substitutions. Proc. 40th Annu …

Gricean Expectations in Online Sentence Comprehension: An ERP Study on the Processing of Scalar Inferences
P Augurzky, M Franke, R Ulrich – Cognitive Science, 2019 – Wiley Online Library
… Share a link. Share on: Email; Facebook; Twitter; Linked In; Reddit. Abstract. There is substantial support for the general idea that a formalization of comprehenders’ expectations about the likely next word in a sentence helps explaining data related to online sentence processing …

The influence of emotional words on predictive processing during sentence comprehension
J Ding, L Wang, Y Yang – Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2020 – Taylor & Francis
… A rose by any other name: Long-term memory structure and sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 41(4), 469–495 … Lexical versus conceptual anticipation during sentence processing: Frontal positivity and N400 ERP components …

Processing foreign-accented speech in a second language: Evidence from ERPs during sentence comprehension in bilinguals
S Grey, LC Schubel, JM McQueen… – Bilingualism: Language …, 2019 – cambridge.org
… In this study, we used the event-related potential (ERP) technique, which makes it possible to study neural activity associated with sentence processing with millisecond timing precision (for reviews, see eg, Kaan, 2007; Swaab, Ledoux, Camblin & Boudewyn, 2012) …

A structured distributional model of sentence meaning and processing
E Chersoni, E Santus, L Pannitto, A Lenci… – Natural Language …, 2019 – cambridge.org
… Psycholinguistic studies in the last two decades have brought extensive evidence that the array of event knowledge activated during sentence processing is extremely rich: verbs (eg arrest) activate expectations about typical arguments (eg cop and thief) and vice versa (McRae …

Processing Prescriptively Incorrect Comparative Particles: Evidence From Sentence-Matching and Eye-Tracking
F Hubers, T Redl, H De Vos, L Reinarz… – Frontiers in …, 2020 – frontiersin.org
Speakers of a language sometimes use particular constructions which violate prescriptive grammar rules. Despite their prescriptive ungrammaticality, they can occur rather frequently. One such example is the comparative construction in Dutch and similarly in German, where the …

No Morphological Markers, No Problem: ERP Study Reveals Semantic Contribution to Distinct Neural Substrates Between Noun and Verb Processing in Online …
J Feng, T Gong, L Shuai, Y Wu – Frontiers in neuroscience, 2019 – frontiersin.org
Neural mechanisms behind noun and verb processing during the course of language comprehension are ubiquitously separate, yet it remains highly controversial as to which factor, syntax or semantics, should be responsible for this separation. This paper conducted an event …

The time course of processing emotion-laden words during sentence reading: Evidence from eye movements
F Knickerbocker, RL Johnson, EL Starr, AM Hall… – Acta Psychologica, 2019 – Elsevier
JavaScript is disabled on your browser. Please enable JavaScript to use all the features on this page. Skip to main content Skip to article …

Behavioral and neural evidence on the processing of ambiguous adjective-noun dependencies in Korean sentence comprehension
Y Nam, U Hong – Brain and Language, 2019 – Elsevier
JavaScript is disabled on your browser. Please enable JavaScript to use all the features on this page. Skip to main content Skip to article …

Individual differences in combinatorial semantic processing: Skilled comprehension facilitates complement coercion during sentence comprehension
CL Johns, L Campanelli, D Kush, N Landi… – 2019 – osf.io
… in the same way as skilled comprehenders (Nation & Snowling, 1998) and may have difficulty deactivating context-inappropriate semantic senses of critical words during sentence processing (Gernsbacher & Robertson, 1995 …

The mechanisms of prediction updating that impact the processing of upcoming word: An event-related potential study on sentence comprehension.
JM Szewczyk, Z Wodniecka – Journal of Experimental Psychology …, 2020 – psycnet.apa.org
One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the presence of predictions in language comprehension comes from event-related potential (ERP) studies which show that encountering an adjective whose gender marking is inconsistent with that of a highly expectable noun leads …

The motor cortex wants the full story: The influence of sentence context on corticospinal excitability in action language processing
F Lebon, C Papaxanthis, C Madden-Lombardi – bioRxiv, 2020 – biorxiv.org
… Reilly, M., Howerton, O., and Desai, RH (2019). Time-course of motor involvement in literal and metaphoric action sentence processing: A TMS study. Front. Psychol … A facilitating role for the primary motor cortex in action sentence processing. Behav. Brain Res. 336, 244–249 …

Spatio-temporal Characteristics of Noun and Verb Processing during Sentence Comprehension in the Brain
S Jat, EJC Laing, P Talukdar, T Mitchell – BioRxiv, 2020 – biorxiv.org
… [Online; accessed 2-March-2019]. [26] Nicole S. Rafidi. Using machine learning for time series to elucidate sentence processing in the brain, 2018. [27] Matthew Ralph, Elizabeth Jefferies, Karalyn Patterson, and Timothy Rogers …

When verbs have bugs: lexical and syntactic processing costs of split particle verbs in sentence comprehension
A Czypionka, F Golcher, J B?aszczak… – Language, Cognition …, 2019 – Taylor & Francis
German particle verbs consist of a base and a particle, two constituents which occupy separate positions in main clauses, but share one lexical entry. It is still unclear if the combination of part…

The processing of blend words in naming and sentence reading
RL Johnson, SR Slate, AR Teevan… – Quarterly Journal of …, 2019 – journals.sagepub.com
Research exploring the processing of morphologically complex words, such as compound words, has found that they are decomposed into their constituent parts during processing. Although much is known…

Effects of Silent English Sentence Reading Training on Processing Formulaic and Non-Formulaic Sequence Knowledge in the L2 Mental Lexicon
H Nishimura – Studies in English Language Teaching, 2020 – jstage.jst.go.jp
… way that NFSs was not. This acceleration is likely attributable to the holistic way in which FSs are processed, which in turn promotes efficient English sentence processing, as reviewed in section 2.2. In short, improvement in …

Integrated vs independent processing of lexical tone and rime in mandarin sentence comprehension: an event-related potential study
Y Zou – 2019 – repository.hkbu.edu.hk
… Hypothesis 2: Tone and rime are independently processed as different units during Mandarin sentence comprehension … Turnbull, 2016), incongruous segmental information should lead to more difficulties in semantic processing than incongruous tonal information …