Effects of sentence-structure complexity on speech initiation time and disfluency.
Tsiamtsiouris, Jim; Cairns, Helen Smith
2013-03-01
There is general agreement that stuttering is caused by a variety of factors, and language formulation and speech motor control are two important factors that have been implicated in previous research, yet the exact nature of their effects is still not well understood. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that sentences of high structural complexity would incur greater processing costs than sentences of low structural complexity and these costs would be higher for adults who stutter than for adults who do not stutter. Fluent adults and adults who stutter participated in an experiment that required memorization of a sentence classified as low or high structural complexity followed by production of that sentence upon a visual cue. Both groups of speakers initiated most sentences significantly faster in the low structural complexity condition than in the high structural complexity condition. Adults who stutter were over-all slower in speech initiation than were fluent speakers, but there were no significant interactions between complexity and group. However, adults who stutter produced significantly more disfluencies in sentences of high structural complexity than in those of low complexity. After reading this article, the learner will be able to: (a) identify integral parts of all well-known models of adult sentence production; (b) summarize the way that sentence structure might negatively influence the speech production processes; (c) discuss whether sentence structure influences speech initiation time and disfluencies. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Online Sentence Reading in People With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking
Knilans, Jessica
2015-01-01
Purpose There is a lot of evidence that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding structurally complex sentences (e.g., object clefts) than simpler sentences (subject clefts). However, subject clefts also occur more frequently in English than object clefts. Thus, it is possible that both structural complexity and frequency affect how people with aphasia understand these structures. Method Nine people with aphasia and 8 age-matched controls participated in the study. The stimuli consisted of 24 object cleft and 24 subject cleft sentences. The task was eye tracking during reading, which permits a more fine-grained analysis of reading performance than measures such as self-paced reading. Results As expected, controls had longer reading times for critical regions in object cleft sentences compared with subject cleft sentences. People with aphasia showed the predicted effects of structural frequency. Effects of structural complexity in people with aphasia did not emerge on their first pass through the sentence but were observed when they were rereading critical regions of complex sentences. Conclusions People with aphasia are sensitive to both structural complexity and structural frequency when reading. However, people with aphasia may use different reading strategies than controls when confronted with relatively infrequent and complex sentence structures. PMID:26383779
Online Sentence Reading in People With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking.
Knilans, Jessica; DeDe, Gayle
2015-11-01
There is a lot of evidence that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding structurally complex sentences (e.g., object clefts) than simpler sentences (subject clefts). However, subject clefts also occur more frequently in English than object clefts. Thus, it is possible that both structural complexity and frequency affect how people with aphasia understand these structures. Nine people with aphasia and 8 age-matched controls participated in the study. The stimuli consisted of 24 object cleft and 24 subject cleft sentences. The task was eye tracking during reading, which permits a more fine-grained analysis of reading performance than measures such as self-paced reading. As expected, controls had longer reading times for critical regions in object cleft sentences compared with subject cleft sentences. People with aphasia showed the predicted effects of structural frequency. Effects of structural complexity in people with aphasia did not emerge on their first pass through the sentence but were observed when they were rereading critical regions of complex sentences. People with aphasia are sensitive to both structural complexity and structural frequency when reading. However, people with aphasia may use different reading strategies than controls when confronted with relatively infrequent and complex sentence structures.
Pupillary dynamics reveal computational cost in sentence planning.
Sevilla, Yamila; Maldonado, Mora; Shalóm, Diego E
2014-01-01
This study investigated the computational cost associated with grammatical planning in sentence production. We measured people's pupillary responses as they produced spoken descriptions of depicted events. We manipulated the syntactic structure of the target by training subjects to use different types of sentences following a colour cue. The results showed higher increase in pupil size for the production of passive and object dislocated sentences than for active canonical subject-verb-object sentences, indicating that more cognitive effort is associated with more complex noncanonical thematic order. We also manipulated the time at which the cue that triggered structure-building processes was presented. Differential increase in pupil diameter for more complex sentences was shown to rise earlier as the colour cue was presented earlier, suggesting that the observed pupillary changes are due to differential demands in relatively independent structure-building processes during grammatical planning. Task-evoked pupillary responses provide a reliable measure to study the cognitive processes involved in sentence production.
How the brain attunes to sentence processing: Relating behavior, structure, and function
Fengler, Anja; Meyer, Lars; Friederici, Angela D.
2016-01-01
Unlike other aspects of language comprehension, the ability to process complex sentences develops rather late in life. Brain maturation as well as verbal working memory (vWM) expansion have been discussed as possible reasons. To determine the factors contributing to this functional development, we assessed three aspects in different age-groups (5–6 years, 7–8 years, and adults): first, functional brain activity during the processing of increasingly complex sentences; second, brain structure in language-related ROIs; and third, the behavioral comprehension performance on complex sentences and the performance on an independent vWM test. At the whole-brain level, brain functional data revealed a qualitatively similar neural network in children and adults including the left pars opercularis (PO), the left inferior parietal lobe together with the posterior superior temporal gyrus (IPL/pSTG), the supplementary motor area, and the cerebellum. While functional activation of the language-related ROIs PO and IPL/pSTG predicted sentence comprehension performance for all age-groups, only adults showed a functional selectivity in these brain regions with increased activation for more complex sentences. The attunement of both the PO and IPL/pSTG toward a functional selectivity for complex sentences is predicted by region-specific gray matter reduction while that of the IPL/pSTG is additionally predicted by vWM span. Thus, both structural brain maturation and vWM expansion provide the basis for the emergence of functional selectivity in language-related brain regions leading to more efficient sentence processing during development. PMID:26777477
Clark, David Glenn
2012-01-01
Background: Despite general agreement that aphasic individuals exhibit difficulty understanding complex sentences, the nature of sentence complexity itself is unresolved. In addition, aphasic individuals appear to make use of heuristic strategies for understanding sentences. This research is a comparison of predictions derived from two approaches to the quantification of sentence complexity, one based on the hierarchical structure of sentences, and the other based on dependency locality theory (DLT). Complexity metrics derived from these theories are evaluated under various assumptions of heuristic use. Method: A set of complexity metrics was derived from each general theory of sentence complexity and paired with assumptions of heuristic use. Probability spaces were generated that summarized the possible patterns of performance across 16 different sentence structures. The maximum likelihood of comprehension scores of 42 aphasic individuals was then computed for each probability space and the expected scores from the best-fitting points in the space were recorded for comparison to the actual scores. Predictions were then compared using measures of fit quality derived from linear mixed effects models. Results: All three of the metrics that provide the most consistently accurate predictions of patient scores rely on storage costs based on the DLT. Patients appear to employ an Agent–Theme heuristic, but vary in their tendency to accept heuristically generated interpretations. Furthermore, the ability to apply the heuristic may be degraded in proportion to aphasia severity. Conclusion: DLT-derived storage costs provide the best prediction of sentence comprehension patterns in aphasia. Because these costs are estimated by counting incomplete syntactic dependencies at each point in a sentence, this finding suggests that aphasia is associated with reduced availability of cognitive resources for maintaining these dependencies. PMID:22590462
Clark, David Glenn
2012-01-01
Despite general agreement that aphasic individuals exhibit difficulty understanding complex sentences, the nature of sentence complexity itself is unresolved. In addition, aphasic individuals appear to make use of heuristic strategies for understanding sentences. This research is a comparison of predictions derived from two approaches to the quantification of sentence complexity, one based on the hierarchical structure of sentences, and the other based on dependency locality theory (DLT). Complexity metrics derived from these theories are evaluated under various assumptions of heuristic use. A set of complexity metrics was derived from each general theory of sentence complexity and paired with assumptions of heuristic use. Probability spaces were generated that summarized the possible patterns of performance across 16 different sentence structures. The maximum likelihood of comprehension scores of 42 aphasic individuals was then computed for each probability space and the expected scores from the best-fitting points in the space were recorded for comparison to the actual scores. Predictions were then compared using measures of fit quality derived from linear mixed effects models. All three of the metrics that provide the most consistently accurate predictions of patient scores rely on storage costs based on the DLT. Patients appear to employ an Agent-Theme heuristic, but vary in their tendency to accept heuristically generated interpretations. Furthermore, the ability to apply the heuristic may be degraded in proportion to aphasia severity. DLT-derived storage costs provide the best prediction of sentence comprehension patterns in aphasia. Because these costs are estimated by counting incomplete syntactic dependencies at each point in a sentence, this finding suggests that aphasia is associated with reduced availability of cognitive resources for maintaining these dependencies.
Des Roches, Carrie A; Vallila-Rohter, Sofia; Villard, Sarah; Tripodis, Yorghos; Caplan, David; Kiran, Swathi
2016-12-01
The current study examined treatment outcomes and generalization patterns following 2 sentence comprehension therapies: object manipulation (OM) and sentence-to-picture matching (SPM). Findings were interpreted within the framework of specific deficit and resource reduction accounts, which were extended in order to examine the nature of generalization following treatment of sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia. Forty-eight individuals with aphasia were enrolled in 1 of 8 potential treatment assignments that varied by task (OM, SPM), complexity of trained sentences (complex, simple), and syntactic movement (noun phrase, wh-movement). Comprehension of trained and untrained sentences was probed before and after treatment using stimuli that differed from the treatment stimuli. Linear mixed-model analyses demonstrated that, although both OM and SPM treatments were effective, OM resulted in greater improvement than SPM. Analyses of covariance revealed main effects of complexity in generalization; generalization from complex to simple linguistically related sentences was observed both across task and across movement. Results are consistent with the complexity account of treatment efficacy, as generalization effects were consistently observed from complex to simpler structures. Furthermore, results provide support for resource reduction accounts that suggest that generalization can extend across linguistic boundaries, such as across movement type.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Scontras, Gregory; Badecker, William; Fedorenko, Evelina
2017-01-01
In our article, "Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production" [Scontras, Badecker, Shank, Lim, & Fedorenko, 2015 (EJ1057757)], we reported two elicited production experiments and argued that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering syntactically complex, object-extracted structures that contain a non-local…
Des Roches, Carrie A.; Vallila-Rohter, Sofia; Villard, Sarah; Tripodis, Yorghos; Caplan, David
2016-01-01
Purpose The current study examined treatment outcomes and generalization patterns following 2 sentence comprehension therapies: object manipulation (OM) and sentence-to-picture matching (SPM). Findings were interpreted within the framework of specific deficit and resource reduction accounts, which were extended in order to examine the nature of generalization following treatment of sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia. Method Forty-eight individuals with aphasia were enrolled in 1 of 8 potential treatment assignments that varied by task (OM, SPM), complexity of trained sentences (complex, simple), and syntactic movement (noun phrase, wh-movement). Comprehension of trained and untrained sentences was probed before and after treatment using stimuli that differed from the treatment stimuli. Results Linear mixed-model analyses demonstrated that, although both OM and SPM treatments were effective, OM resulted in greater improvement than SPM. Analyses of covariance revealed main effects of complexity in generalization; generalization from complex to simple linguistically related sentences was observed both across task and across movement. Conclusions Results are consistent with the complexity account of treatment efficacy, as generalization effects were consistently observed from complex to simpler structures. Furthermore, results provide support for resource reduction accounts that suggest that generalization can extend across linguistic boundaries, such as across movement type. PMID:27997950
Thompson, Cynthia K.; Riley, Ellyn A.; den Ouden, Dirk-Bart; Meltzer-Asscher, Aya; Lukic, Sladjana
2013-01-01
Introduction Neuroimaging and lesion studies indicate a left hemisphere network for verb and verb argument structure processing, involving both frontal and temporoparietal brain regions. Although their verb comprehension is generally unimpaired, it is well known that individuals with agrammatic aphasia often present with verb production deficits, characterized by an argument structure complexity hierarchy, indicating faulty access to argument structure representations for production and integration into syntactic contexts. Recovery of verb processing in agrammatism, however, has received little attention and no studies have examined the neural mechanisms associated with improved verb and argument structure processing. In the present study we trained agrammatic individuals on verbs with complex argument structure in sentence contexts and examined generalization to verbs with less complex argument structure. The neural substrates of improved verb production were examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Methods Eight individuals with chronic agrammatic aphasia participated in the study (four experimental and four control participants). Production of three-argument verbs in active sentences was trained using a sentence generation task emphasizing the verb’s argument structure and the thematic roles of sentential noun phrases. Before and after training, production of trained and untrained verbs was tested in naming and sentence production and fMRI scans were obtained, using an action naming task. Results Significant pre- to post-training improvement in trained and untrained (one- and two-argument) verbs was found for treated, but not control, participants, with between-group differences found for verb naming, production of verbs in sentences, and production of argument structure. fMRI activation derived from post-treatment compared to pre-treatment scans revealed upregulation in cortical regions implicated for verb and argument structure processing in healthy controls. Conclusions Training verb deficits emphasizing argument structure and thematic role mapping is effective for improving verb and sentence production and results in recruitment of neural networks engaged for verb and argument structure processing in healthy individuals. PMID:23514929
Mehri, Azar; Ghorbani, Askar; Darzi, Ali; Jalaie, Shohreh; Ashayeri, Hassan
2016-01-05
Cerebrovascular disease leading to stroke is the most common cause of aphasia. Speakers with agrammatic non-fluent aphasia have difficulties in production of movement-derived sentences such as passive sentences, topicalized constituents, and Wh-questions. To assess the production of complex sentences, some passive, topicalized and focused sentences were designed for patients with non-fluent Persian aphasic. Afterwards, patients' performance in sentence production was tested and compared with healthy non-damaged subjects. In this cross sectional study, a task was designed to assess the different types of sentences (active, passive, topicalized and focused) adapted to Persian structures. Seven Persian patients with post-stroke non-fluent agrammatic aphasia (5 men and 2 women) and seven healthy non-damaged subjects participated in this study. The computed tomography (CT) scan or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that all the patients had a single left hemisphere lesion involved middle cerebral artery (MCA), Broca`s area and in its white matter. In addition, based on Bedside version of Persian Western Aphasia Battery (P-WAB-1), all of them were diagnosed with moderate Broca aphasia. Then, the production task of Persian complex sentences was administered. There was a significant difference between four types of sentences in patients with aphasia [Degree of freedom (df) = 3, P < 0.001]. All the patients showed worse performance than the healthy participants in all the four types of sentence production (P < 0.050). In general, it is concluded that topicalized and focused sentences as non-canonical complex sentences in Persian are very difficult to produce for patients with agrammatic non-fluent aphasia. It seems that sentences with A-movement are simpler for the patients than sentences involving A`-movement; since they include shorter movements in compare to topicalized and focused sentences.
Carroll, Rebecca; Uslar, Verena; Brand, Thomas; Ruigendijk, Esther
The authors aimed to determine whether hearing impairment affects sentence comprehension beyond phoneme or word recognition (i.e., on the sentence level), and to distinguish grammatically induced processing difficulties in structurally complex sentences from perceptual difficulties associated with listening to degraded speech. Effects of hearing impairment or speech in noise were expected to reflect hearer-specific speech recognition difficulties. Any additional processing time caused by the sustained perceptual challenges across the sentence may either be independent of or interact with top-down processing mechanisms associated with grammatical sentence structure. Forty-nine participants listened to canonical subject-initial or noncanonical object-initial sentences that were presented either in quiet or in noise. Twenty-four participants had mild-to-moderate hearing impairment and received hearing-loss-specific amplification. Twenty-five participants were age-matched peers with normal hearing status. Reaction times were measured on-line at syntactically critical processing points as well as two control points to capture differences in processing mechanisms. An off-line comprehension task served as an additional indicator of sentence (mis)interpretation, and enforced syntactic processing. The authors found general effects of hearing impairment and speech in noise that negatively affected perceptual processing, and an effect of word order, where complex grammar locally caused processing difficulties for the noncanonical sentence structure. Listeners with hearing impairment were hardly affected by noise at the beginning of the sentence, but were affected markedly toward the end of the sentence, indicating a sustained perceptual effect of speech recognition. Comprehension of sentences with noncanonical word order was negatively affected by degraded signals even after sentence presentation. Hearing impairment adds perceptual processing load during sentence processing, but affects grammatical processing beyond the word level to the same degree as in normal hearing, with minor differences in processing mechanisms. The data contribute to our understanding of individual differences in speech perception and language understanding. The authors interpret their results within the ease of language understanding model.
Weber, Kirsten; Luther, Lisa; Indefrey, Peter; Hagoort, Peter
2016-05-01
When we learn a second language later in life, do we integrate it with the established neural networks in place for the first language or is at least a partially new network recruited? While there is evidence that simple grammatical structures in a second language share a system with the native language, the story becomes more multifaceted for complex sentence structures. In this study, we investigated the underlying brain networks in native speakers compared with proficient second language users while processing complex sentences. As hypothesized, complex structures were processed by the same large-scale inferior frontal and middle temporal language networks of the brain in the second language, as seen in native speakers. These effects were seen both in activations and task-related connectivity patterns. Furthermore, the second language users showed increased task-related connectivity from inferior frontal to inferior parietal regions of the brain, regions related to attention and cognitive control, suggesting less automatic processing for these structures in a second language.
Linguistic Complexity and Information Structure in Korean: Evidence from Eye-Tracking during Reading
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lee, Yoonhyoung; Lee, Hanjung; Gordon, Peter C.
2007-01-01
The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded…
Cho-Reyes, Soojin; Thompson, Cynthia K.
2015-01-01
Background Verbs and sentences are often impaired in individuals with aphasia, and differential impairment patterns are associated with different types of aphasia. With currently available test batteries, however, it is challenging to provide a comprehensive profile of aphasic language impairments because they do not examine syntactically important properties of verbs and sentences. Aims This study presents data derived from the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS; Thompson, 2011), a new test battery designed to examine syntactic deficits in aphasia. The NAVS includes tests for verb naming and comprehension, and production of verb argument structure in simple active sentences, with each examining the effects of the number and optionality of arguments. The NAVS also tests production and comprehension of canonical and non-canonical sentences. Methods & Procedures A total of 59 aphasic participants (35 agrammatic and 24 anomic) were tested using a set of action pictures. Participants produced verbs or sentences for the production subtests and identified pictures corresponding to auditorily provided verbs or sentences for the comprehension subtests. Outcomes & Results The agrammatic group, compared to the anomic group, performed significantly more poorly on all subtests except verb comprehension, and for both groups comprehension was less impaired than production. On verb naming and argument structure production tests both groups exhibited difficulty with three-argument verbs, affected by the number and optionality of arguments. However, production of sentences using three-argument verbs was more impaired in the agrammatic, compared to the anomic, group. On sentence production and comprehension tests, the agrammatic group showed impairments in all types of non-canonical sentences, whereas the anomic group exhibited difficulty primarily with the most difficult, object relative, structures. Conclusions Results show that verb and sentence deficits seen in individuals with agrammatic aphasia are largely influenced by syntactic complexity; however, individuals with anomic aphasia appear to exhibit these impairments only for the most complex forms of verbs and sentences. The present data indicate that the NAVS is useful for characterising verb and sentence deficits in people with aphasia. PMID:26379358
Love, Tracy; Haist, Frank; Nicol, Janet; Swinney, David
2009-01-01
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study directly examined an issue that bridges the potential language processing and multi-modal views of the role of Broca’s area: the effects of task-demands in language comprehension studies. We presented syntactically simple and complex sentences for auditory comprehension under three different (differentially complex) task-demand conditions: passive listening, probe verification, and theme judgment. Contrary to many language imaging findings, we found that both simple and complex syntactic structures activated left inferior frontal cortex (L-IFC). Critically, we found activation in these frontal regions increased together with increased task-demands. Specifically, tasks that required greater manipulation and comparison of linguistic material recruited L-IFC more strongly; independent of syntactic structure complexity. We argue that much of the presumed syntactic effects previously found in sentence imaging studies of L-IFC may, among other things, reflect the tasks employed in these studies and that L-IFC is a region underlying mnemonic and other integrative functions, on which much language processing may rely. PMID:16881268
Wendt, Dorothea; Brand, Thomas; Kollmeier, Birger
2014-01-01
An eye-tracking paradigm was developed for use in audiology in order to enable online analysis of the speech comprehension process. This paradigm should be useful in assessing impediments in speech processing. In this paradigm, two scenes, a target picture and a competitor picture, were presented simultaneously with an aurally presented sentence that corresponded to the target picture. At the same time, eye fixations were recorded using an eye-tracking device. The effect of linguistic complexity on language processing time was assessed from eye fixation information by systematically varying linguistic complexity. This was achieved with a sentence corpus containing seven German sentence structures. A novel data analysis method computed the average tendency to fixate the target picture as a function of time during sentence processing. This allowed identification of the point in time at which the participant understood the sentence, referred to as the decision moment. Systematic differences in processing time were observed as a function of linguistic complexity. These differences in processing time may be used to assess the efficiency of cognitive processes involved in resolving linguistic complexity. Thus, the proposed method enables a temporal analysis of the speech comprehension process and has potential applications in speech audiology and psychoacoustics.
Wendt, Dorothea; Brand, Thomas; Kollmeier, Birger
2014-01-01
An eye-tracking paradigm was developed for use in audiology in order to enable online analysis of the speech comprehension process. This paradigm should be useful in assessing impediments in speech processing. In this paradigm, two scenes, a target picture and a competitor picture, were presented simultaneously with an aurally presented sentence that corresponded to the target picture. At the same time, eye fixations were recorded using an eye-tracking device. The effect of linguistic complexity on language processing time was assessed from eye fixation information by systematically varying linguistic complexity. This was achieved with a sentence corpus containing seven German sentence structures. A novel data analysis method computed the average tendency to fixate the target picture as a function of time during sentence processing. This allowed identification of the point in time at which the participant understood the sentence, referred to as the decision moment. Systematic differences in processing time were observed as a function of linguistic complexity. These differences in processing time may be used to assess the efficiency of cognitive processes involved in resolving linguistic complexity. Thus, the proposed method enables a temporal analysis of the speech comprehension process and has potential applications in speech audiology and psychoacoustics. PMID:24950184
Who was the agent? The neural correlates of reanalysis processes during sentence comprehension.
Hirotani, Masako; Makuuchi, Michiru; Rüschemeyer, Shirley-Ann; Friederici, Angela D
2011-11-01
Sentence comprehension is a complex process. Besides identifying the meaning of each word and processing the syntactic structure of a sentence, it requires the computation of thematic information, that is, information about who did what to whom. The present fMRI study investigated the neural basis for thematic reanalysis (reanalysis of the thematic roles initially assigned to noun phrases in a sentence) and its interplay with syntactic reanalysis (reanalysis of the underlying syntactic structure originally constructed for a sentence). Thematic reanalysis recruited a network consisting of Broca's area, that is, the left pars triangularis (LPT), and the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, whereas only LPT showed greater sensitivity to syntactic reanalysis. These data provide direct evidence for a functional neuroanatomical basis for two linguistically motivated reanalysis processes during sentence comprehension. Copyright © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Segregating the core computational faculty of human language from working memory.
Makuuchi, Michiru; Bahlmann, Jörg; Anwander, Alfred; Friederici, Angela D
2009-05-19
In contrast to simple structures in animal vocal behavior, hierarchical structures such as center-embedded sentences manifest the core computational faculty of human language. Previous artificial grammar learning studies found that the left pars opercularis (LPO) subserves the processing of hierarchical structures. However, it is not clear whether this area is activated by the structural complexity per se or by the increased memory load entailed in processing hierarchical structures. To dissociate the effect of structural complexity from the effect of memory cost, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of German sentence processing with a 2-way factorial design tapping structural complexity (with/without hierarchical structure, i.e., center-embedding of clauses) and working memory load (long/short distance between syntactically dependent elements; i.e., subject nouns and their respective verbs). Functional imaging data revealed that the processes for structure and memory operate separately but co-operatively in the left inferior frontal gyrus; activities in the LPO increased as a function of structural complexity, whereas activities in the left inferior frontal sulcus (LIFS) were modulated by the distance over which the syntactic information had to be transferred. Diffusion tensor imaging showed that these 2 regions were interconnected through white matter fibers. Moreover, functional coupling between the 2 regions was found to increase during the processing of complex, hierarchically structured sentences. These results suggest a neuroanatomical segregation of syntax-related aspects represented in the LPO from memory-related aspects reflected in the LIFS, which are, however, highly interconnected functionally and anatomically.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Miller, A. Kate
2015-01-01
This study reports on a sentence processing experiment in second language (L2) French that looks for evidence of trace reactivation at clause edge and in the canonical object position in indirect object cleft sentences with complex embedding and cyclic movement. Reaction time (RT) asymmetries were examined among low (n = 20) and high (n = 20)…
Segregating the core computational faculty of human language from working memory
Makuuchi, Michiru; Bahlmann, Jörg; Anwander, Alfred; Friederici, Angela D.
2009-01-01
In contrast to simple structures in animal vocal behavior, hierarchical structures such as center-embedded sentences manifest the core computational faculty of human language. Previous artificial grammar learning studies found that the left pars opercularis (LPO) subserves the processing of hierarchical structures. However, it is not clear whether this area is activated by the structural complexity per se or by the increased memory load entailed in processing hierarchical structures. To dissociate the effect of structural complexity from the effect of memory cost, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of German sentence processing with a 2-way factorial design tapping structural complexity (with/without hierarchical structure, i.e., center-embedding of clauses) and working memory load (long/short distance between syntactically dependent elements; i.e., subject nouns and their respective verbs). Functional imaging data revealed that the processes for structure and memory operate separately but co-operatively in the left inferior frontal gyrus; activities in the LPO increased as a function of structural complexity, whereas activities in the left inferior frontal sulcus (LIFS) were modulated by the distance over which the syntactic information had to be transferred. Diffusion tensor imaging showed that these 2 regions were interconnected through white matter fibers. Moreover, functional coupling between the 2 regions was found to increase during the processing of complex, hierarchically structured sentences. These results suggest a neuroanatomical segregation of syntax-related aspects represented in the LPO from memory-related aspects reflected in the LIFS, which are, however, highly interconnected functionally and anatomically. PMID:19416819
DeCaro, Renee; Peelle, Jonathan E; Grossman, Murray; Wingfield, Arthur
2016-01-01
Reduced hearing acuity is among the most prevalent of chronic medical conditions among older adults. An experiment is reported in which comprehension of spoken sentences was tested for older adults with good hearing acuity or with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and young adults with age-normal hearing. Comprehension was measured by participants' ability to determine the agent of an action in sentences that expressed this relation with a syntactically less complex subject-relative construction or a syntactically more complex object-relative construction. Agency determination was further challenged by inserting a prepositional phrase into sentences between the person performing an action and the action being performed. As a control, prepositional phrases of equivalent length were also inserted into sentences in a non-disruptive position. Effects on sentence comprehension of age, hearing acuity, prepositional phrase placement and sound level of stimulus presentations appeared only for comprehension of sentences with the more syntactically complex object-relative structures. Working memory as tested by reading span scores accounted for a significant amount of the variance in comprehension accuracy. Once working memory capacity and hearing acuity were taken into account, chronological age among the older adults contributed no further variance to comprehension accuracy. Results are discussed in terms of the positive and negative effects of sensory-cognitive interactions in comprehension of spoken sentences and lend support to a framework in which domain-general executive resources, notably verbal working memory, play a role in both linguistic and perceptual processing.
Linguistic complexity and information structure in Korean: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading
Lee, Yoonhyoung; Lee, Hanjung; Gordon, Peter C.
2006-01-01
The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded complement sentences; the third experiment additionally examined reading of sentences with object-modifying, object-extracted relative clauses. In Korean, both of these structures place two NPs with nominative case marking early in the sentence, with the embedded and matrix verbs following later. The type (pronoun, name or description) of these two critical NPs was varied in the experiments. When the initial NPs were of the same type, comprehension was slowed after participants had read the sentence-final verbs, a finding that supports the view that working memory in language comprehension is constrained by similarity-based interference during the retrieval of information necessary to determine the syntactic or semantic relations between noun phrases and verb phrases. Ease of comprehension was also influenced by the association between type of NP and syntactic position, with the best performance being observed when more definite NPs (pronouns and names) were in a prominent syntactic position (e.g., matrix subject) and less definite NPs (descriptions) were in a non-prominent syntactic position (embedded subject). This pattern provides evidence that the interpretation of sentences is facilitated by consistent packaging of information in different linguistic elements. PMID:16970936
Structural Priming: A Critical Review
Pickering, Martin J.; Ferreira, Victor S.
2009-01-01
Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers make extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is structural priming, a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced (“prime”) sentence (Bock, 1986). The recent explosion of research in structural priming has made it the dominant means of investigating the processes involved in the production (and increasingly, comprehension) of complex expressions such as sentences. This review considers its implications for the representation of syntax and the mechanisms of production, comprehension, and their relationship. It then addresses the potential functions of structural priming, before turning to its implications for first language acquisition, bilingualism, and aphasia We close with theoretical and empirical recommendations for future investigations. PMID:18444704
Kiran, Swathi; Caplan, David; Sandberg, Chaleece; Levy, Joshua; Berardino, Alex; Ascenso, Elsa; Villard, Sarah; Tripodis, Yorghos
2012-05-01
Two new treatments, 1 based on sentence to picture matching (SPM) and the other on object manipulation (OM), that train participants on the thematic roles of sentences using pictures or by manipulating objects were piloted. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design, sentence comprehension was trained on the affected sentence type in 1 task-related protocol in 15 participants with aphasia. The 2 tasks were SPM and OM; the treatment stimuli were object relatives, object clefts, passives, and unaccusatives, as well as two control structures-object relatives with a complex noun phrase (NP) and active sentences with three NPs. The criteria for efficacious treatment was an increase in the level of performance from the pretreatment probes to the posttreatment probes for the treated structure such that accuracy rose from at or below chance to above chance and either (a) accuracy rose by 33% or (b) the effect size was 2.6. Based on these criteria, the success rate for training the target structure was 2/6 participants in the SPM condition and 4/7 participants in the OM condition. The outcome of this study illustrates the utility of this theoretically motivated and efficacious treatment for sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia.
Kollmeier, Birger; Brand, Thomas
2015-01-01
The main objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which hearing impairment influences the duration of sentence processing. An eye-tracking paradigm is introduced that provides an online measure of how hearing impairment prolongs processing of linguistically complex sentences; this measure uses eye fixations recorded while the participant listens to a sentence. Eye fixations toward a target picture (which matches the aurally presented sentence) were measured in the presence of a competitor picture. Based on the recorded eye fixations, the single target detection amplitude, which reflects the tendency of the participant to fixate the target picture, was used as a metric to estimate the duration of sentence processing. The single target detection amplitude was calculated for sentence structures with different levels of linguistic complexity and for different listening conditions: in quiet and in two different noise conditions. Participants with hearing impairment spent more time processing sentences, even at high levels of speech intelligibility. In addition, the relationship between the proposed online measure and listener-specific factors, such as hearing aid use and cognitive abilities, was investigated. Longer processing durations were measured for participants with hearing impairment who were not accustomed to using a hearing aid. Moreover, significant correlations were found between sentence processing duration and individual cognitive abilities (such as working memory capacity or susceptibility to interference). These findings are discussed with respect to audiological applications. PMID:25910503
Leech, Robert; Aydelott, Jennifer; Symons, Germaine; Carnevale, Julia; Dick, Frederic
2007-11-01
How does the development and consolidation of perceptual, attentional, and higher cognitive abilities interact with language acquisition and processing? We explored children's (ages 5-17) and adults' (ages 18-51) comprehension of morphosyntactically varied sentences under several competing speech conditions that varied in the degree of attentional demands, auditory masking, and semantic interference. We also evaluated the relationship between subjects' syntactic comprehension and their word reading efficiency and general 'speed of processing'. We found that the interactions between perceptual and attentional processes and complex sentence interpretation changed considerably over the course of development. Perceptual masking of the speech signal had an early and lasting impact on comprehension, particularly for more complex sentence structures. In contrast, increased attentional demand in the absence of energetic auditory masking primarily affected younger children's comprehension of difficult sentence types. Finally, the predictability of syntactic comprehension abilities by external measures of development and expertise is contingent upon the perceptual, attentional, and semantic milieu in which language processing takes place.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Erdocia, Kepa; Laka, Itziar; Mestres-Misse, Anna; Rodriguez-Fornells, Antoni
2009-01-01
In natural languages some syntactic structures are simpler than others. Syntactically complex structures require further computation that is not required by syntactically simple structures. In particular, canonical, basic word order represents the simplest sentence-structure. Natural languages have different canonical word orders, and they vary in…
Can Individuals with Down Syndrome Improve Their Grammar?
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sepulveda, Esther Moraleda; Lopez-Villasenor, Miguel Lazaro; Heinze, Elena Garayzabal
2013-01-01
Morphosyntax constitutes one of the most complex areas of language. It takes into account the structure of the word and that of the sentence, and its development allows one to establish adequately agreements both within the nominal phrase and in the rest of the sentence. Morphosyntax is particularly impaired in individuals with Down syndrome. To…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Riches, N. G.; Loucas, T.; Baird, G.; Charman, T.; Simonoff, E.
2010-01-01
Background: Recent studies have indicated that many children with autism spectrum disorders present with language difficulties that are similar to those of children with specific language impairments, leading some to argue for similar structural deficits in these two disorders. Aims: Repetition of sentences involving long-distance dependencies was…
A case for the sentence in reading comprehension.
Scott, Cheryl M
2009-04-01
This article addresses sentence comprehension as a requirement of reading comprehension within the framework of the narrow view of reading that was advocated in the prologue to this forum. The focus is on the comprehension requirements of complex sentences, which are characteristic of school texts. Topics included in this discussion are (a) evidence linking sentence comprehension and syntax with reading, (b) syntactic properties of sentences that make them difficult to understand, (c) clinical applications for the assessment of sentence comprehension as it relates to reading, and (d) evidence and methods for addressing sentence complexity in treatment. Sentence complexity can create comprehension problems for struggling readers. The contribution of sentence comprehension to successful reading has been overlooked in models that emphasize domain-general comprehension strategies at the text level. The author calls for the evaluation of sentence comprehension within the context of content domains where complex sentences are found.
Linguistic Factors Influencing Speech Audiometric Assessment
Krijger, Stefanie; Meeuws, Matthias; De Ceulaer, Geert
2016-01-01
In speech audiometric testing, hearing performance is typically measured by calculating the number of correct repetitions of a speech stimulus. We investigate to what extent the repetition accuracy of Dutch speech stimuli presented against a background noise is influenced by nonauditory processes. We show that variation in verbal repetition accuracy is partially explained by morpholexical and syntactic features of the target language. Verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and pronouns yield significantly lower correct repetitions than nouns, adjectives, or adverbs. The reduced repetition performance for verbs and function words is probably best explained by the similarities in the perceptual nature of verbal morphology and function words in Dutch. For sentences, an overall negative effect of syntactic complexity on speech repetition accuracy was found. The lowest number of correct repetitions was obtained with passive sentences, reflecting the cognitive cost of processing a noncanonical sentence structure. Taken together, these findings may have important implications for the audiological practice. In combination with hearing loss, linguistic complexity may increase the cognitive demands to process sentences in noise, leading to suboptimal functional hearing in day-to-day listening situations. Using test sentences with varying degrees of syntactic complexity may therefore provide useful information to measure functional hearing benefits. PMID:27830152
DeCaro, Renee; Peelle, Jonathan E.; Grossman, Murray; Wingfield, Arthur
2016-01-01
Reduced hearing acuity is among the most prevalent of chronic medical conditions among older adults. An experiment is reported in which comprehension of spoken sentences was tested for older adults with good hearing acuity or with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and young adults with age-normal hearing. Comprehension was measured by participants’ ability to determine the agent of an action in sentences that expressed this relation with a syntactically less complex subject-relative construction or a syntactically more complex object-relative construction. Agency determination was further challenged by inserting a prepositional phrase into sentences between the person performing an action and the action being performed. As a control, prepositional phrases of equivalent length were also inserted into sentences in a non-disruptive position. Effects on sentence comprehension of age, hearing acuity, prepositional phrase placement and sound level of stimulus presentations appeared only for comprehension of sentences with the more syntactically complex object-relative structures. Working memory as tested by reading span scores accounted for a significant amount of the variance in comprehension accuracy. Once working memory capacity and hearing acuity were taken into account, chronological age among the older adults contributed no further variance to comprehension accuracy. Results are discussed in terms of the positive and negative effects of sensory–cognitive interactions in comprehension of spoken sentences and lend support to a framework in which domain-general executive resources, notably verbal working memory, play a role in both linguistic and perceptual processing. PMID:26973557
Resolving Conflicts Between Syntax and Plausibility in Sentence Comprehension
Andrews, Glenda; Ogden, Jessica E.; Halford, Graeme S.
2017-01-01
Comprehension of plausible and implausible object- and subject-relative clause sentences with and without prepositional phrases was examined. Undergraduates read each sentence then evaluated a statement as consistent or inconsistent with the sentence. Higher acceptance of consistent than inconsistent statements indicated reliance on syntactic analysis. Higher acceptance of plausible than implausible statements reflected reliance on semantic plausibility. There was greater reliance on semantic plausibility and lesser reliance on syntactic analysis for more complex object-relatives and sentences with prepositional phrases than for less complex subject-relatives and sentences without prepositional phrases. Comprehension accuracy and confidence were lower when syntactic analysis and semantic plausibility yielded conflicting interpretations. The conflict effect on comprehension was significant for complex sentences but not for less complex sentences. Working memory capacity predicted resolution of the syntax-plausibility conflict in more and less complex items only when sentences and statements were presented sequentially. Fluid intelligence predicted resolution of the conflict in more and less complex items under sequential and simultaneous presentation. Domain-general processes appear to be involved in resolving syntax-plausibility conflicts in sentence comprehension. PMID:28458748
Leonard, Laurence B; Deevy, Patricia; Fey, Marc E; Bredin-Oja, Shelley L
2013-04-01
This study examined sentence comprehension in children with specific language impairment (SLI) in a manner designed to separate the contribution of cognitive capacity from the effects of syntactic structure. Nineteen children with SLI, 19 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A), and 19 younger typically developing children (TD-Y) matched according to sentence comprehension test scores responded to sentence comprehension items that varied in either length or their demands on cognitive capacity, based on the nature of the foils competing with the target picture. The TD-A children were accurate across all item types. The SLI and TD-Y groups were less accurate than the TD-A group on items with greater length and, especially, on items with the greatest demands on cognitive capacity. The types of errors were consistent with failure to retain details of the sentence apart from syntactic structure. The difficulty in the more demanding conditions seemed attributable to interference. Specifically, the children with SLI and the TD-Y children appeared to have difficulty retaining details of the target sentence when the information reflected in the foils closely resembled the information in the target sentence.
Direct brain recordings reveal hippocampal rhythm underpinnings of language processing.
Piai, Vitória; Anderson, Kristopher L; Lin, Jack J; Dewar, Callum; Parvizi, Josef; Dronkers, Nina F; Knight, Robert T
2016-10-04
Language is classically thought to be supported by perisylvian cortical regions. Here we provide intracranial evidence linking the hippocampal complex to linguistic processing. We used direct recordings from the hippocampal structures to investigate whether theta oscillations, pivotal in memory function, track the amount of contextual linguistic information provided in sentences. Twelve participants heard sentences that were either constrained ("She locked the door with the") or unconstrained ("She walked in here with the") before presentation of the final word ("key"), shown as a picture that participants had to name. Hippocampal theta power increased for constrained relative to unconstrained contexts during sentence processing, preceding picture presentation. Our study implicates hippocampal theta oscillations in a language task using natural language associations that do not require memorization. These findings reveal that the hippocampal complex contributes to language in an active fashion, relating incoming words to stored semantic knowledge, a necessary process in the generation of sentence meaning.
Effects of Sentence-Structure Complexity on Speech Initiation Time and Disfluency
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Tsiamtsiouris, Jim; Cairns, Helen Smith
2013-01-01
There is general agreement that stuttering is caused by a variety of factors, and language formulation and speech motor control are two important factors that have been implicated in previous research, yet the exact nature of their effects is still not well understood. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that sentences of high structural…
Development of a Frequency-based Measure of Syntactic Difficulty for Estimating Readability.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Selden, Ramsay
Readability estimates are usually based on measures of word difficulty and measures of sentence difficulty. Word difficulty is measured in two ways: by the structural size and complexity of words or by reference to phonomena of language use, such as word-list frequency or the regularity of spelling patterns. Sentence difficulty is measured only in…
Neural correlates of early-closure garden-path processing: Effects of prosody and plausibility.
den Ouden, Dirk-Bart; Dickey, Michael Walsh; Anderson, Catherine; Christianson, Kiel
2016-01-01
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate neural correlates of early-closure garden-path sentence processing and use of extrasyntactic information to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities. Sixteen participants performed an auditory picture verification task on sentences presented with natural versus flat intonation. Stimuli included sentences in which the garden-path interpretation was plausible, implausible because of a late pragmatic cue, or implausible because of a semantic mismatch between an optionally transitive verb and the following noun. Natural sentence intonation was correlated with left-hemisphere temporal activation, but also with activation that suggests the allocation of more resources to interpretation when natural prosody is provided. Garden-path processing was associated with upregulation in bilateral inferior parietal and right-hemisphere dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior frontal cortex, while differences between the strength and type of plausibility cues were also reflected in activation patterns. Region of interest (ROI) analyses in regions associated with complex syntactic processing are consistent with a role for posterior temporal cortex supporting access to verb argument structure. Furthermore, ROI analyses within left-hemisphere inferior frontal gyrus suggest a division of labour, with the anterior-ventral part primarily involved in syntactic-semantic mismatch detection, the central part supporting structural reanalysis, and the posterior-dorsal part showing a general structural complexity effect.
Wendt, Dorothea; Kollmeier, Birger; Brand, Thomas
2015-04-24
The main objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which hearing impairment influences the duration of sentence processing. An eye-tracking paradigm is introduced that provides an online measure of how hearing impairment prolongs processing of linguistically complex sentences; this measure uses eye fixations recorded while the participant listens to a sentence. Eye fixations toward a target picture (which matches the aurally presented sentence) were measured in the presence of a competitor picture. Based on the recorded eye fixations, the single target detection amplitude, which reflects the tendency of the participant to fixate the target picture, was used as a metric to estimate the duration of sentence processing. The single target detection amplitude was calculated for sentence structures with different levels of linguistic complexity and for different listening conditions: in quiet and in two different noise conditions. Participants with hearing impairment spent more time processing sentences, even at high levels of speech intelligibility. In addition, the relationship between the proposed online measure and listener-specific factors, such as hearing aid use and cognitive abilities, was investigated. Longer processing durations were measured for participants with hearing impairment who were not accustomed to using a hearing aid. Moreover, significant correlations were found between sentence processing duration and individual cognitive abilities (such as working memory capacity or susceptibility to interference). These findings are discussed with respect to audiological applications. © The Author(s) 2015.
Complex Sentence Comprehension and Working Memory in Children With Specific Language Impairment
Montgomery, James W.; Evans, Julia L.
2015-01-01
Purpose This study investigated the association of 2 mechanisms of working memory (phonological short-term memory [PSTM], attentional resource capacity/allocation) with the sentence comprehension of school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 groups of control children. Method Twenty-four children with SLI, 18 age-matched (CA) children, and 16 language- and memory-matched (LMM) children completed a nonword repetition task (PSTM), the competing language processing task (CLPT; resource capacity/allocation), and a sentence comprehension task comprising complex and simple sentences. Results (1) The SLI group performed worse than the CA group on each memory task; (2) all 3 groups showed comparable simple sentence comprehension, but for complex sentences, the SLI and LMM groups performed worse than the CA group; (3) for the SLI group, (a) CLPT correlated with complex sentence comprehension, and (b) nonword repetition correlated with simple sentence comprehension; (4) for CA children, neither memory variable correlated with either sentence type; and (5) for LMM children, only CLPT correlated with complex sentences. Conclusions Comprehension of both complex and simple grammar by school-age children with SLI is a mentally demanding activity, requiring significant working memory resources. PMID:18723601
Conceptual structure modulates structural priming in the production of complex sentences
Griffin, Zenzi M.; Weinstein-Tull, Justin
2016-01-01
Speakers tend to reproduce syntactic structures that they have recently comprehended or produced. This structural or syntactic priming occurs despite differences in the particular conceptual or event roles expressed in prime and target sentences (Bock & Loebell, 1990). In two sentence recall studies, we used the tendency of speakers to paraphrase the finite complements of object-raising verbs as infinitive complements (e.g., “John believed that Mary was nice” as “John believed Mary to be nice”) to test whether an additional conceptual role would affect priming. Prime constructions with identical constituent orders as object-raising infinitives but an additional conceptual role (“John persuaded Mary to be nice”) resulted in fewer paraphrases. Contrasts with other constructions suggest that the critical difference between primes was this extra conceptual role. Thus, subtle differences in conceptual structures can affect how speakers grammatically encode message elements. PMID:28066128
Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Sentence-Level Speech Kinematics.
Jackson, Eric S; Tiede, Mark; Riley, Michael A; Whalen, D H
2016-12-01
Current approaches to assessing sentence-level speech variability rely on measures that quantify variability across utterances and use normalization procedures that alter raw trajectory data. The current work tests the feasibility of a less restrictive nonlinear approach-recurrence quantification analysis (RQA)-via a procedural example and subsequent analysis of kinematic data. To test the feasibility of RQA, lip aperture (i.e., the Euclidean distance between lip-tracking sensors) was recorded for 21 typically developing adult speakers during production of a simple utterance. The utterance was produced in isolation and in carrier structures differing just in length or in length and complexity. Four RQA indices were calculated: percent recurrence (%REC), percent determinism (%DET), stability (MAXLINE), and stationarity (TREND). Percent determinism (%DET) decreased only for the most linguistically complex sentence; MAXLINE decreased as a function of linguistic complexity but increased for the longer-only sentence; TREND decreased as a function of both length and linguistic complexity. This research note demonstrates the feasibility of using RQA as a tool to compare speech variability across speakers and groups. RQA offers promise as a technique to assess effects of potential stressors (e.g., linguistic or cognitive factors) on the speech production system.
Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Sentence-Level Speech Kinematics
Tiede, Mark; Riley, Michael A.; Whalen, D. H.
2016-01-01
Purpose Current approaches to assessing sentence-level speech variability rely on measures that quantify variability across utterances and use normalization procedures that alter raw trajectory data. The current work tests the feasibility of a less restrictive nonlinear approach—recurrence quantification analysis (RQA)—via a procedural example and subsequent analysis of kinematic data. Method To test the feasibility of RQA, lip aperture (i.e., the Euclidean distance between lip-tracking sensors) was recorded for 21 typically developing adult speakers during production of a simple utterance. The utterance was produced in isolation and in carrier structures differing just in length or in length and complexity. Four RQA indices were calculated: percent recurrence (%REC), percent determinism (%DET), stability (MAXLINE), and stationarity (TREND). Results Percent determinism (%DET) decreased only for the most linguistically complex sentence; MAXLINE decreased as a function of linguistic complexity but increased for the longer-only sentence; TREND decreased as a function of both length and linguistic complexity. Conclusions This research note demonstrates the feasibility of using RQA as a tool to compare speech variability across speakers and groups. RQA offers promise as a technique to assess effects of potential stressors (e.g., linguistic or cognitive factors) on the speech production system. PMID:27824987
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Akin, Judy O'Neal
1978-01-01
Sample sentence-combining lessons developed to accompany the first-year A-LM German textbook are presented. The exercises are designed for language manipulation practice; they involve breaking down more complex sentences into simpler sentences and the subsequent recombination into complex sentences. All language skills, and particularly writing,…
Morphosyntax of Complex Predicates in South Caucasian Languages
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lomashvili, Leila
2010-01-01
The argument structure of complex predicates such as causatives and applicatives is closely associated with the functional heads that introduce core and non-core arguments: Voice, causative and applicative. These elements merge in a sentence structure at various cycles of derivation and take complements whose "size" accounts for the meaning and…
Linking Neural and Symbolic Representation and Processing of Conceptual Structures
van der Velde, Frank; Forth, Jamie; Nazareth, Deniece S.; Wiggins, Geraint A.
2017-01-01
We compare and discuss representations in two cognitive architectures aimed at representing and processing complex conceptual (sentence-like) structures. First is the Neural Blackboard Architecture (NBA), which aims to account for representation and processing of complex and combinatorial conceptual structures in the brain. Second is IDyOT (Information Dynamics of Thinking), which derives sentence-like structures by learning statistical sequential regularities over a suitable corpus. Although IDyOT is designed at a level more abstract than the neural, so it is a model of cognitive function, rather than neural processing, there are strong similarities between the composite structures developed in IDyOT and the NBA. We hypothesize that these similarities form the basis of a combined architecture in which the individual strengths of each architecture are integrated. We outline and discuss the characteristics of this combined architecture, emphasizing the representation and processing of conceptual structures. PMID:28848460
Topic Structure Affects Semantic Integration: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials
Yang, Xiaohong; Chen, Xuhai; Chen, Shuang; Xu, Xiaoying; Yang, Yufang
2013-01-01
This study investigated whether semantic integration in discourse context could be influenced by topic structure using event-related brain potentials. Participants read discourses in which the last sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with the topic established in the first sentence. The intervening sentences between the first and the last sentence of the discourse either maintained or shifted the original topic. Results showed that incongruent words in topic-maintained discourses elicited an N400 effect that was broadly distributed over the scalp while those in topic-shifted discourses elicited an N400 effect that was lateralized to the right hemisphere and localized over central and posterior areas. Moreover, a late positivity effect was only elicited by incongruent words in topic-shifted discourses, but not in topic-maintained discourses. This suggests an important role for discourse structure in semantic integration, such that compared with topic-maintained discourses, the complexity of discourse structure in topic-shifted condition reduces the initial stage of semantic integration and enhances the later stage in which a mental representation is updated. PMID:24348994
Topic structure affects semantic integration: evidence from event-related potentials.
Yang, Xiaohong; Chen, Xuhai; Chen, Shuang; Xu, Xiaoying; Yang, Yufang
2013-01-01
This study investigated whether semantic integration in discourse context could be influenced by topic structure using event-related brain potentials. Participants read discourses in which the last sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with the topic established in the first sentence. The intervening sentences between the first and the last sentence of the discourse either maintained or shifted the original topic. Results showed that incongruent words in topic-maintained discourses elicited an N400 effect that was broadly distributed over the scalp while those in topic-shifted discourses elicited an N400 effect that was lateralized to the right hemisphere and localized over central and posterior areas. Moreover, a late positivity effect was only elicited by incongruent words in topic-shifted discourses, but not in topic-maintained discourses. This suggests an important role for discourse structure in semantic integration, such that compared with topic-maintained discourses, the complexity of discourse structure in topic-shifted condition reduces the initial stage of semantic integration and enhances the later stage in which a mental representation is updated.
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Čech, Radek; Mačutek, Ján; Žabokrtský, Zdeněk
2011-10-01
Syntax of natural language has been the focus of linguistics for decades. The complex network theory, being one of new research tools, opens new perspectives on syntax properties of the language. Despite numerous partial achievements, some fundamental problems remain unsolved. Specifically, although statistical properties typical for complex networks can be observed in all syntactic networks, the impact of syntax itself on these properties is still unclear. The aim of the present study is to shed more light on the role of syntax in the syntactic network structure. In particular, we concentrate on the impact of the syntactic function of a verb in the sentence on the complex network structure. Verbs play the decisive role in the sentence structure (“local” importance). From this fact we hypothesize the importance of verbs in the complex network (“global” importance). The importance of verb in the complex network is assessed by the number of links which are directed from the node representing verb to other nodes in the network. Six languages (Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese) were used for testing the hypothesis.
Sentence Production in Parkinson Disease: Effects of Conceptual and Task Complexity
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Troche, Michelle S.; Altmann, Lori J. P.
2012-01-01
Experimental studies of sentence production in Parkinson disease (PD) are rare. This study examined the relationship between cognitive abilities and performance on two sentence production tasks, sentence repetition, and sentence generation, in which complexity was manipulated. Thirty-eight older adults aged 60 to 85, half with PD, completed the…
Dependency-based Siamese long short-term memory network for learning sentence representations
Zhu, Wenhao; Ni, Jianyue; Wei, Baogang; Lu, Zhiguo
2018-01-01
Textual representations play an important role in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The efficiency of NLP tasks, such as text comprehension and information extraction, can be significantly improved with proper textual representations. As neural networks are gradually applied to learn the representation of words and phrases, fairly efficient models of learning short text representations have been developed, such as the continuous bag of words (CBOW) and skip-gram models, and they have been extensively employed in a variety of NLP tasks. Because of the complex structure generated by the longer text lengths, such as sentences, algorithms appropriate for learning short textual representations are not applicable for learning long textual representations. One method of learning long textual representations is the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, which is suitable for processing sequences. However, the standard LSTM does not adequately address the primary sentence structure (subject, predicate and object), which is an important factor for producing appropriate sentence representations. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes the dependency-based LSTM model (D-LSTM). The D-LSTM divides a sentence representation into two parts: a basic component and a supporting component. The D-LSTM uses a pre-trained dependency parser to obtain the primary sentence information and generate supporting components, and it also uses a standard LSTM model to generate the basic sentence components. A weight factor that can adjust the ratio of the basic and supporting components in a sentence is introduced to generate the sentence representation. Compared with the representation learned by the standard LSTM, the sentence representation learned by the D-LSTM contains a greater amount of useful information. The experimental results show that the D-LSTM is superior to the standard LSTM for sentences involving compositional knowledge (SICK) data. PMID:29513748
Neurophysiology of Hungarian subject-verb dependencies with varying intervening complexity.
Jolsvai, Hajnal; Sussman, Elyse; Csuhaj, Roland; Csépe, Valéria
2011-12-01
Non-adjacent dependencies are thought to be more costly to process than sentences wherein dependents immediately follow or precede what they depend on. In English locality effects have been revealed, while in languages with rich case marking (German and Hindi) sentence final structures show anti-locality-effects. The motivation of the current study is to test whether locality effects can be directly applied to a typologically different language than those investigated so far. Hungarian is a "topic prominent" language; it permits a variation of possible word sequencing for semantic reasons, including SVO word order. Hungarian also has a rich morphological system (e.g., rich case system) and postpositions to indicate grammatical functions. In the present ERP study, Hungarian subject-verb dependencies were compared by manipulating the mismatch of number agreement between the sentence's initial noun phrase and the sentence's final intransitive verb as well as the complexity of the intervening sentence material, interrupting the dependencies. Possible lexical class and frequency or cloze-probability effects for the first two words of the intervening sentence material were revealed when used separate baseline for each word, while at the third word of the intervening material as well as at the main verb ERPs were not modulated by complexity but at the verb ERPs were enhanced by grammaticality. Ungrammatical sentences enlarged the amplitude of both LAN and P600 components at the main verb. These results are in line with studies suggesting that the retrieval of the first element of a dependency is not influenced by distance from the second element, as the first element is directly accessible when needed for integration (e.g., McElree, 2000). Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The Challenge of Challenging Text
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Shanahan, Timothy; Fisher, Douglas; Frey, Nancy
2012-01-01
The Common Core State Standards emphasize the value of teaching students to engage with complex text. But what exactly makes a text complex, and how can teachers help students develop their ability to learn from such texts? The authors of this article discuss five factors that determine text complexity: vocabulary, sentence structure, coherence,…
Hinaut, Xavier; Dominey, Peter Ford
2013-01-01
Sentence processing takes place in real-time. Previous words in the sentence can influence the processing of the current word in the timescale of hundreds of milliseconds. Recent neurophysiological studies in humans suggest that the fronto-striatal system (frontal cortex, and striatum--the major input locus of the basal ganglia) plays a crucial role in this process. The current research provides a possible explanation of how certain aspects of this real-time processing can occur, based on the dynamics of recurrent cortical networks, and plasticity in the cortico-striatal system. We simulate prefrontal area BA47 as a recurrent network that receives on-line input about word categories during sentence processing, with plastic connections between cortex and striatum. We exploit the homology between the cortico-striatal system and reservoir computing, where recurrent frontal cortical networks are the reservoir, and plastic cortico-striatal synapses are the readout. The system is trained on sentence-meaning pairs, where meaning is coded as activation in the striatum corresponding to the roles that different nouns and verbs play in the sentences. The model learns an extended set of grammatical constructions, and demonstrates the ability to generalize to novel constructions. It demonstrates how early in the sentence, a parallel set of predictions are made concerning the meaning, which are then confirmed or updated as the processing of the input sentence proceeds. It demonstrates how on-line responses to words are influenced by previous words in the sentence, and by previous sentences in the discourse, providing new insight into the neurophysiology of the P600 ERP scalp response to grammatical complexity. This demonstrates that a recurrent neural network can decode grammatical structure from sentences in real-time in order to generate a predictive representation of the meaning of the sentences. This can provide insight into the underlying mechanisms of human cortico-striatal function in sentence processing.
Hinaut, Xavier; Dominey, Peter Ford
2013-01-01
Sentence processing takes place in real-time. Previous words in the sentence can influence the processing of the current word in the timescale of hundreds of milliseconds. Recent neurophysiological studies in humans suggest that the fronto-striatal system (frontal cortex, and striatum – the major input locus of the basal ganglia) plays a crucial role in this process. The current research provides a possible explanation of how certain aspects of this real-time processing can occur, based on the dynamics of recurrent cortical networks, and plasticity in the cortico-striatal system. We simulate prefrontal area BA47 as a recurrent network that receives on-line input about word categories during sentence processing, with plastic connections between cortex and striatum. We exploit the homology between the cortico-striatal system and reservoir computing, where recurrent frontal cortical networks are the reservoir, and plastic cortico-striatal synapses are the readout. The system is trained on sentence-meaning pairs, where meaning is coded as activation in the striatum corresponding to the roles that different nouns and verbs play in the sentences. The model learns an extended set of grammatical constructions, and demonstrates the ability to generalize to novel constructions. It demonstrates how early in the sentence, a parallel set of predictions are made concerning the meaning, which are then confirmed or updated as the processing of the input sentence proceeds. It demonstrates how on-line responses to words are influenced by previous words in the sentence, and by previous sentences in the discourse, providing new insight into the neurophysiology of the P600 ERP scalp response to grammatical complexity. This demonstrates that a recurrent neural network can decode grammatical structure from sentences in real-time in order to generate a predictive representation of the meaning of the sentences. This can provide insight into the underlying mechanisms of human cortico-striatal function in sentence processing. PMID:23383296
Whence Structured Propositions?
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Keller, Lorraine Juliano
2012-01-01
This thesis is a critical examination of "Structured Propositionalism" (SP), the view that propositions are complex entities composed of the semantic values of the (meaningful) parts of the sentences that express them. According to SP, propositions have constituents and are individuated by the identity and arrangement of their…
Bader, Markus
2018-01-01
This paper presents three acceptability experiments investigating German verb-final clauses in order to explore possible sources of sentence complexity during human parsing. The point of departure was De Vries et al.'s (2011) generalization that sentences with three or more crossed or nested dependencies are too complex for being processed by the human parsing mechanism without difficulties. This generalization is partially based on findings from Bach et al. (1986) concerning the acceptability of complex verb clusters in German and Dutch. The first experiment tests this generalization by comparing two sentence types: (i) sentences with three nested dependencies within a single clause that contains three verbs in a complex verb cluster; (ii) sentences with four nested dependencies distributed across two embedded clauses, one center-embedded within the other, each containing a two-verb cluster. The results show that sentences with four nested dependencies are judged as acceptable as control sentences with only two nested dependencies, whereas sentences with three nested dependencies are judged as only marginally acceptable. This argues against De Vries et al.'s (2011) claim that the human parser can process no more than two nested dependencies. The results are used to refine the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis of Bader and Schmid (2009a). The second and the third experiment investigate sentences with four nested dependencies in more detail in order to explore alternative sources of sentence complexity: the number of predicted heads to be held in working memory (storage cost in terms of the Dependency Locality Theory [DLT], Gibson, 2000) and the length of the involved dependencies (integration cost in terms of the DLT). Experiment 2 investigates sentences for which storage cost and integration cost make conflicting predictions. The results show that storage cost outweighs integration cost. Experiment 3 shows that increasing integration cost in sentences with two degrees of center embedding leads to decreased acceptability. Taken together, the results argue in favor of a multifactorial account of the limitations on center embedding in natural languages. PMID:29410633
Bader, Markus
2017-01-01
This paper presents three acceptability experiments investigating German verb-final clauses in order to explore possible sources of sentence complexity during human parsing. The point of departure was De Vries et al.'s (2011) generalization that sentences with three or more crossed or nested dependencies are too complex for being processed by the human parsing mechanism without difficulties. This generalization is partially based on findings from Bach et al. (1986) concerning the acceptability of complex verb clusters in German and Dutch. The first experiment tests this generalization by comparing two sentence types: (i) sentences with three nested dependencies within a single clause that contains three verbs in a complex verb cluster; (ii) sentences with four nested dependencies distributed across two embedded clauses, one center-embedded within the other, each containing a two-verb cluster. The results show that sentences with four nested dependencies are judged as acceptable as control sentences with only two nested dependencies, whereas sentences with three nested dependencies are judged as only marginally acceptable. This argues against De Vries et al.'s (2011) claim that the human parser can process no more than two nested dependencies. The results are used to refine the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis of Bader and Schmid (2009a). The second and the third experiment investigate sentences with four nested dependencies in more detail in order to explore alternative sources of sentence complexity: the number of predicted heads to be held in working memory (storage cost in terms of the Dependency Locality Theory [DLT], Gibson, 2000) and the length of the involved dependencies (integration cost in terms of the DLT). Experiment 2 investigates sentences for which storage cost and integration cost make conflicting predictions. The results show that storage cost outweighs integration cost. Experiment 3 shows that increasing integration cost in sentences with two degrees of center embedding leads to decreased acceptability. Taken together, the results argue in favor of a multifactorial account of the limitations on center embedding in natural languages.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Magimairaj, Beula M.; Montgomery, James W.
2012-01-01
Purpose: This study investigated the role of processing complexity of verbal working memory tasks in predicting spoken sentence comprehension in typically developing children. Of interest was whether simple and more complex working memory tasks have similar or different power in predicting sentence comprehension. Method: Sixty-five children (6- to…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
MacPherson, Megan K.; Smith, Anne
2013-01-01
Purpose: To investigate the potential effects of increased sentence length and syntactic complexity on the speech motor control of children who stutter (CWS). Method: Participants repeated sentences of varied length and syntactic complexity. Kinematic measures of articulatory coordination variability and movement duration during perceptually…
Fitz, Hartmut; Chang, Franklin
2017-09-01
Nativist theories have argued that language involves syntactic principles which are unlearnable from the input children receive. A paradigm case of these innate principles is the structure dependence of auxiliary inversion in complex polar questions (Chomsky, 1968, 1975, 1980). Computational approaches have focused on the properties of the input in explaining how children acquire these questions. In contrast, we argue that messages are structured in a way that supports structure dependence in syntax. We demonstrate this approach within a connectionist model of sentence production (Chang, 2009) which learned to generate a range of complex polar questions from a structured message without positive exemplars in the input. The model also generated different types of error in development that were similar in magnitude to those in children (e.g., auxiliary doubling, Ambridge, Rowland, & Pine, 2008; Crain & Nakayama, 1987). Through model comparisons we trace how meaning constraints and linguistic experience interact during the acquisition of auxiliary inversion. Our results suggest that auxiliary inversion rules in English can be acquired without innate syntactic principles, as long as it is assumed that speakers who ask complex questions express messages that are structured into multiple propositions. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Sheppard, Shannon M; Love, Tracy; Midgley, Katherine J; Holcomb, Phillip J; Shapiro, Lewis P
2017-12-01
Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine how individuals with aphasia and a group of age-matched controls use prosody and themattic fit information in sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Two groups of individuals with aphasia were investigated; those demonstrating relatively good sentence comprehension whose primary language difficulty is anomia (Individuals with Anomic Aphasia (IWAA)), and those who demonstrate impaired sentence comprehension whose primary diagnosis is Broca's aphasia (Individuals with Broca's Aphasia (IWBA)). The stimuli had early closure syntactic structure and contained a temporary early closure (correct)/late closure (incorrect) syntactic ambiguity. The prosody was manipulated to either be congruent or incongruent, and the temporarily ambiguous NP was also manipulated to either be a plausible or an implausible continuation for the subordinate verb (e.g., "While the band played the song/the beer pleased all the customers."). It was hypothesized that an implausible NP in sentences with incongruent prosody may provide the parser with a plausibility cue that could be used to predict syntactic structure. The results revealed that incongruent prosody paired with a plausibility cue resulted in an N400-P600 complex at the implausible NP (the beer) in both the controls and the IWAAs, yet incongruent prosody without a plausibility cue resulted in an N400-P600 at the critical verb (pleased) only in healthy controls. IWBAs did not show evidence of N400 or P600 effects at the ambiguous NP or critical verb, although they did show evidence of a delayed N400 effect at the sentence-final word in sentences with incongruent prosody. These results suggest that IWAAs have difficulty integrating prosodic cues with underlying syntactic structure when lexical-semantic information is not available to aid their parse. IWBAs have difficulty integrating both prosodic and lexical-semantic cues with syntactic structure, likely due to a processing delay. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Mobayyen, Forouzan; de Almeida, Roberto G
2005-03-01
One hundred and forty normal undergraduate students participated in a Proactive Interference (PI) experiment with sentences containing verbs from four different semantic and morphological classes (lexical causatives, morphological causatives, and morphologically complex and simplex perception verbs). Past research has shown significant PI build-up effects for semantically and morphologically complex verbs in isolation (de Almeida & Mobayyen, 2004). The results of the present study show that, when embedded into sentence contexts, semantically and morphologically complex verbs do not produce significant PI build-up effects. Different verb classes, however, yield different recall patterns: sentences with semantically complex verbs (e.g., causatives) were recalled significantly better than sentences with semantically simplex verbs (e.g., perception verbs). The implications for the nature of both verb-conceptual representations and category-specific semantic deficits are discussed.
Memory for Negation in Coordinate and Complex Sentences
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Harris, Richard J.
1976-01-01
Two experiments were run to test memory for the negation morpheme "not" in coordinate sentences (e.g., The ballerina had twins and the policewoman did not have triplets) and complex sentences (e.g., The ghost scared Hamlet into not murdering Shakespeare). (Editor)
Sukenik, Nufar; Friedmann, Naama
2018-01-01
Do individuals with autism have a developmental syntactic impairment, DLI (formerly known as SLI)? In this study we directly compared the performance of 18 individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 9;0-18;0 years with that of 93 individuals with Syntactic-Developmental Language Impairment (SyDLI) aged 8;8-14;6 (and with 166 typically-developing children aged 5;2-18;1). We tested them using three syntactic tests assessing the comprehension and production of syntactic structures that are known to be sensitive to syntactic impairment: elicitation of subject and object relative clauses, reading and paraphrasing of object relatives, and repetition of complex syntactic structures including Wh questions, relative clauses, topicalized sentences, sentences with verb movement, sentences with A-movement, and embedded sentences. The results were consistent across the three tasks: the overall rate of correct performance on the syntactic tasks is similar for the children with ASD and those with SyDLI. However, once we look closer, they are very different. The types of errors of the ASD group differ from those of the SyDLI group-the children with ASD provide various types of pragmatically infelicitous responses that are not evinced in the SyDLI or in the age equivalent typically-developing groups. The two groups (ASD and SyDLI) also differ in the pattern of performance-the children with SyDLI show a syntactically-principled pattern of impairment, with selective difficulty in specific sentence types (such as sentences derived by movement of the object across the subject), and normal performance on other structures (such as simple sentences). In contrast, the ASD participants showed generalized low performance on the various sentence structures. Syntactic performance was far from consistent within the ASD group. Whereas all ASD participants had errors that can originate in pragmatic/discourse difficulties, seven of them had completely normal syntax in the structures we tested, and were able to produce, understand, and repeat relative clauses, Wh questions, and topicalized sentences. Only one ASD participant showed a syntactically-principled deficit similar to that of individuals with SyDLI. We conclude that not all individuals with ASD have syntactic difficulties, and that even when they fail in a syntactic task, this does not necessarily originate in a syntactic impairment. This shows that looking only at the total score in a syntactic test may be insufficient, and a fuller picture emerges once the performance on different structures and the types of erroneous responses are analyzed.
Sukenik, Nufar; Friedmann, Naama
2018-01-01
Do individuals with autism have a developmental syntactic impairment, DLI (formerly known as SLI)? In this study we directly compared the performance of 18 individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 9;0–18;0 years with that of 93 individuals with Syntactic-Developmental Language Impairment (SyDLI) aged 8;8–14;6 (and with 166 typically-developing children aged 5;2–18;1). We tested them using three syntactic tests assessing the comprehension and production of syntactic structures that are known to be sensitive to syntactic impairment: elicitation of subject and object relative clauses, reading and paraphrasing of object relatives, and repetition of complex syntactic structures including Wh questions, relative clauses, topicalized sentences, sentences with verb movement, sentences with A-movement, and embedded sentences. The results were consistent across the three tasks: the overall rate of correct performance on the syntactic tasks is similar for the children with ASD and those with SyDLI. However, once we look closer, they are very different. The types of errors of the ASD group differ from those of the SyDLI group—the children with ASD provide various types of pragmatically infelicitous responses that are not evinced in the SyDLI or in the age equivalent typically-developing groups. The two groups (ASD and SyDLI) also differ in the pattern of performance—the children with SyDLI show a syntactically-principled pattern of impairment, with selective difficulty in specific sentence types (such as sentences derived by movement of the object across the subject), and normal performance on other structures (such as simple sentences). In contrast, the ASD participants showed generalized low performance on the various sentence structures. Syntactic performance was far from consistent within the ASD group. Whereas all ASD participants had errors that can originate in pragmatic/discourse difficulties, seven of them had completely normal syntax in the structures we tested, and were able to produce, understand, and repeat relative clauses, Wh questions, and topicalized sentences. Only one ASD participant showed a syntactically-principled deficit similar to that of individuals with SyDLI. We conclude that not all individuals with ASD have syntactic difficulties, and that even when they fail in a syntactic task, this does not necessarily originate in a syntactic impairment. This shows that looking only at the total score in a syntactic test may be insufficient, and a fuller picture emerges once the performance on different structures and the types of erroneous responses are analyzed. PMID:29670550
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Balthazar, Catherine H.; Scott, Cheryl M.
2018-01-01
Purpose: This study investigated the effects of a complex sentence treatment at 2 dosage levels on language performance of 30 school-age children ages 10-14 years with specific language impairment. Method: Three types of complex sentences (adverbial, object complement, relative) were taught in sequence in once or twice weekly dosage conditions.…
Thai Language Sentence Similarity Computation Based on Syntactic Structure and Semantic Vector
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Wang, Hongbin; Feng, Yinhan; Cheng, Liang
2018-03-01
Sentence similarity computation plays an increasingly important role in text mining, Web page retrieval, machine translation, speech recognition and question answering systems. Thai language as a kind of resources scarce language, it is not like Chinese language with HowNet and CiLin resources. So the Thai sentence similarity research faces some challenges. In order to solve this problem of the Thai language sentence similarity computation. This paper proposes a novel method to compute the similarity of Thai language sentence based on syntactic structure and semantic vector. This method firstly uses the Part-of-Speech (POS) dependency to calculate two sentences syntactic structure similarity, and then through the word vector to calculate two sentences semantic similarity. Finally, we combine the two methods to calculate two Thai language sentences similarity. The proposed method not only considers semantic, but also considers the sentence syntactic structure. The experiment result shows that this method in Thai language sentence similarity computation is feasible.
The Effects of Syntactic Complexity on Processing Sentences in Noise
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Carroll, Rebecca; Ruigendijk, Esther
2013-01-01
This paper discusses the influence of stationary (non-fluctuating) noise on processing and understanding of sentences, which vary in their syntactic complexity (with the factors canonicity, embedding, ambiguity). It presents data from two RT-studies with 44 participants testing processing of German sentences in silence and in noise. Results show a…
A Bilingual Advantage in Controlling Language Interference during Sentence Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Filippi, Roberto; Leech, Robert; Thomas, Michael S. C.; Green, David W.; Dick, Frederic
2012-01-01
This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian-English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Barry, Sue; Lazarte, Alejandro A.
1995-01-01
This study tested the effect of embedded clauses on recall for 48 English-speaking high school students reading Spanish historical texts. It found that the complexity of sentence structure seemed to cancel the advantage of previous exposure to the content domain. Contains 39 references. (MDM)
Acoustic richness modulates the neural networks supporting intelligible speech processing.
Lee, Yune-Sang; Min, Nam Eun; Wingfield, Arthur; Grossman, Murray; Peelle, Jonathan E
2016-03-01
The information contained in a sensory signal plays a critical role in determining what neural processes are engaged. Here we used interleaved silent steady-state (ISSS) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how human listeners cope with different degrees of acoustic richness during auditory sentence comprehension. Twenty-six healthy young adults underwent scanning while hearing sentences that varied in acoustic richness (high vs. low spectral detail) and syntactic complexity (subject-relative vs. object-relative center-embedded clause structures). We manipulated acoustic richness by presenting the stimuli as unprocessed full-spectrum speech, or noise-vocoded with 24 channels. Importantly, although the vocoded sentences were spectrally impoverished, all sentences were highly intelligible. These manipulations allowed us to test how intelligible speech processing was affected by orthogonal linguistic and acoustic demands. Acoustically rich speech showed stronger activation than acoustically less-detailed speech in a bilateral temporoparietal network with more pronounced activity in the right hemisphere. By contrast, listening to sentences with greater syntactic complexity resulted in increased activation of a left-lateralized network including left posterior lateral temporal cortex, left inferior frontal gyrus, and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Significant interactions between acoustic richness and syntactic complexity occurred in left supramarginal gyrus, right superior temporal gyrus, and right inferior frontal gyrus, indicating that the regions recruited for syntactic challenge differed as a function of acoustic properties of the speech. Our findings suggest that the neural systems involved in speech perception are finely tuned to the type of information available, and that reducing the richness of the acoustic signal dramatically alters the brain's response to spoken language, even when intelligibility is high. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Attention and L2 Learners' Segmentation of Complex Sentences
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hagiwara, Akiko
2010-01-01
The main objective of the current study is to investigate L2 Japanese learners' ability to segment complex sentences from aural input. Elementary- and early intermediate-level L2 learners in general have not developed the ability to use syntactic cues to interpret the meaning of sentences they hear. In the case of Japanese, recognition of…
Sentence processing selectivity in Broca's area: evident for structure but not syntactic movement.
Rogalsky, Corianne; Almeida, Diogo; Sprouse, Jon; Hickok, Gregory
The role of Broca's area in sentence processing is hotly debated. Prominent hypotheses include that Broca's area supports sentence comprehension via syntax-specific processes ("syntactic movement" in particular), hierarchical structure building or working memory. In the present fMRI study we adopt a within subject, across task approach using targeted sentence-level contrasts and non-sentential comparison tasks to address these hypotheses regarding the role of Broca's area in sentence processing. For clarity, we have presented findings as three experiments: (i) Experiment 1 examines selectivity for a particular type of sentence construction, namely those containing syntactic movement. Standard syntactic movement distance effects in Broca's area were replicated but no difference was found between movement and non-movement sentences in Broca's area at the group level or consistently in individual subjects. (ii) Experiment 2 examines selectivity for sentences versus non-sentences, to assess claims regarding the role of Broca's area in hierarchical structure building. Group and individual results differ, but both identify subregions of Broca's area that are selective for sentence structure. (iii) Experiment 3 assesses whether activations in Broca's area are selective for sentences when contrasted with simple subvocal articulation. Group results suggest shared resources for sentence processing and articulation in Broca's area, but individual subject analyses contradict this finding. We conclude that Broca's area is not selectively involved in processing syntactic movement, but that subregions are selectively responsive to sentence structure. Our findings also reinforce Fedorenko & Kanwishser's call for the use of more individual subject analyses in functional imaging studies of sentence processing in Broca's area, as group findings can obscure selective response patterns.
Can Intonational Phrase Structure be Primed (like Syntactic Structure)?
Tooley, Kristen M.; Konopka, Agnieszka E.; Watson, Duane G.
2013-01-01
In three experiments, we investigated whether intonational phrase structure can be primed. In all experiments, participants listened to sentences in which the presence and location of intonational phrase boundaries was manipulated such that the recording either included no intonational phrase boundaries, a boundary in a structurally dispreferred location, in a preferred location, or in both locations. In Experiment 1, participants repeated the sentences to test whether they would reproduce the prosodic structure they had just heard. Experiments 2 and 3 used a prime-target paradigm to evaluate whether the intonational phrase structure heard in the prime sentence might influence that of a novel target sentence. Experiment 1 showed that participants did repeat back sentences that they just heard with the original intonational phrase structure, yet Experiments 2 and 3 found that exposure to intonational phrase boundaries on prime trials did not influence how a novel target sentence was prosodically phrased. These results suggest that speakers may retain the intonational phrasing of a sentence, but this effect is not long-lived and does not generalize across unrelated sentences. Furthermore, these findings provide no evidence that intonational phrase structure is formulated during a planning stage that is separate from other sources of linguistic information. PMID:24188467
Service, Elisabet; Maury, Sini
2015-01-01
Working memory (WM) has been described as an interface between cognition and action, or a system for access to a limited amount of information needed in complex cognition. Access to morphological information is needed for comprehending and producing sentences. The present study probed WM for morphologically complex word forms in Finnish, a morphologically rich language. We studied monomorphemic (boy), inflected (boy+’s), and derived (boy+hood) words in three tasks. Simple span, immediate serial recall of words, in Experiment 1, is assumed to mainly rely on information in the focus of attention. Sentence span, a dual task combining sentence reading with recall of the last word (Experiment 2) or of a word not included in the sentence (Experiment 3) is assumed to involve establishment of a search set in long-term memory for fast activation into the focus of attention. Recall was best for monomorphemic and worst for inflected word forms with performance on derived words in between. However, there was an interaction between word type and experiment, suggesting that complex span is more sensitive to morphological complexity in derivations than simple span. This was explored in a within-subjects Experiment 4 combining all three tasks. An interaction between morphological complexity and task was replicated. Both inflected and derived forms increased load in WM. In simple span, recall of inflectional forms resulted in form errors. Complex span tasks were more sensitive to morphological load in derived words, possibly resulting from interference from morphological neighbors in the mental lexicon. The results are best understood as involving competition among inflectional forms when binding words from input into an output structure, and competition from morphological neighbors in secondary memory during cumulative retrieval-encoding cycles. Models of verbal recall need to be able to represent morphological as well as phonological and semantic information. PMID:25642181
Reading and listening in people with aphasia: effects of syntactic complexity.
DeDe, Gayle
2013-11-01
The purpose of this study was to compare online effects of syntactic complexity in written and spoken sentence comprehension in people with aphasia (PWA) and adults with no brain damage (NBD). The participants in Experiment 1 were NBD older and younger adults (n = 20 per group). The participants in Experiment 2 were 10 PWA. In both experiments, the participants read and listened to sentences in self-paced reading and listening tasks. The experimental materials consisted of object cleft sentences (e.g., It was the girl who the boy hugged.) and subject cleft sentences (e.g., It was the boy who hugged the girl.). The predicted effects of syntactic complexity were observed in both Experiments 1 and 2: Reading and listening times were longer for the verb in sentences with object compared to subject relative clauses. The NBD controls showed exaggerated effects of syntactic complexity in reading compared to listening. The PWA did not show different modality effects from the NBD participants. Although effects of syntactic complexity were somewhat exaggerated in reading compared with listening, both the PWA and the NBD controls showed similar effects in both modalities.
Working memory and planning during sentence production.
Martin, Randi C; Yan, Hao; Schnur, Tatiana T
2014-10-01
Speakers retrieve conceptual, syntactic and lexical information in advance of articulation during sentence production. What type of working memory (WM) store is used to hold the planned information before speaking? To address this question, we measured onset latencies when subjects produced sentences that began with either a complex or a simple initial noun phrase, while holding semantic, phonological or spatial information in WM. Although we found that subjects had longer onset latencies for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, showing a phrasal scope of planning, the magnitude of this complexity effect was not affected by any type of WM load. However, subjects made more syntactic errors (but not lexical errors) for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, suggesting that advance planning for these phrases occurs at a syntactic rather than lexical-semantic level, which may account for the lack of effect with various types of WM load in the current study. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Tracking reading: dual task costs of oral reading for young versus older adults.
Kemper, Susan; Bontempo, Daniel; Schmalzried, RaLynn; McKedy, Whitney; Tagliaferri, Bruno; Kieweg, Doug
2014-02-01
A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor oral reading costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were reading out short paragraphs. Multilevel modeling was used to determine how paragraph-level predictors of length, grammatical complexity, and readability and person-level predictors such as speaker age or working memory capacity predicted reading and tracking performance. In addition, sentence-by-sentence variation in tracking performance was examined during the production of individual sentences and during the pauses before upcoming sentences. The results suggest that dual tasking has a greater impact on older adults' reading comprehension and tracking performance. At the level of individual sentences, young and older adults adopt different strategies to deal with grammatically complex and propositionally dense sentences.
Dual Task Costs of Oral Reading for Young versus Older Adults
Kemper, Susan; Bontempo, Daniel; Schmalzried, RaLynn; McKedy, Whitney; Tagliaferri, Bruno; Kieweg, Doug
2013-01-01
A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor oral reading costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were reading out short paragraphs. Multilevel modeling was used to determine how paragraph-level predictors of length, grammatical complexity, and readability and person-level predictors such as speaker age or working memory capacity predicted reading and tracking performance. In addition, sentence-by-sentence variation in tracking performance was examined during the production of individual sentences and during the pauses before upcoming sentences. The results suggest that dual tasking has a greater impact on older adults’ reading comprehension and tracking performance. At the level of individual sentences, young and older adults adopt different strategies to deal with grammatically complex and propositionally dense sentences. PMID:23463405
Koul, Rajinder; Corwin, Melinda; Hayes, Summer
2005-01-01
The study employed a single-subject multiple baseline design to examine the ability of 9 individuals with severe Broca's aphasia or global aphasia to produce graphic symbol sentences of varying syntactical complexity using a software program that turns a computer into a speech output communication device. The sentences ranged in complexity from simple two-word phrases to those with morphological inflections, transformations, and relative clauses. Overall, results indicated that individuals with aphasia are able to access, manipulate, and combine graphic symbols to produce phrases and sentences of varying degrees of syntactical complexity. The findings are discussed in terms of the clinical and public policy implications.
Sentence Position and Syntactic Complexity of Stuttering in Early Childhood: A Longitudinal Study
Buhr, Anthony P.; Zebrowski, Patricia M.
2009-01-01
The purpose of the present investigation was to assess longitudinal word- and sentence-level measures of stuttering in young children. Participants included 12 stuttering and non-stuttering children between 36 and 71 months of age at an initial who exhibited a range of stuttering rates. Parent-child spontaneous speech samples were obtained over a period of two years at six-month intervals. Each speech sample was transcribed, and both stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and other disfluencies (ODs) were coded. Word and sentence-level measures of SLDs were used to assess linguistic characteristics of stuttering. Results of the word-level analysis indicated that stuttering was most likely to occur at the sentence-initial position, but that a tendency to stutter on function words was present only at the sentence-initial position. Results of the sentence-level analyses indicated that sentences containing ODs and those containing SLDs were both significantly longer and more complex than fluent sentences, but did not differ from each other. Word- and sentence-level measures also did not change across visits. Results were taken to suggest that both SLDs and ODs originate during the same stage of sentence planning. PMID:19948270
The Thematic Structure of the Sentence in English and Polish.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Szwedek, Aleksander
An important feature of the sentence in any language is its thematic structure, new/given information organization. It has been found that in English, where word order is grammatically determined, the thematic structure is signalled by the place of the sentence stress. If an indefinite noun (new information) is present in the sentence, it bears…
On the acquisition of temporal conjunctions in Finnish.
Atanassova, M
2001-03-01
This study concerns the acquisition of complex sentence structures in Finnish. Specifically, three simultaneous and sequential events were acted out with toys in an elicitation task, and the production of "and," "and then," "when," and "after" were observed. There were 48 children in a cross-sectional design at the age levels 3, 4, 5, and 6 years. Immediately after the complex event was presented, the child was asked the initial request "What happened?" If the child did not produce the whole event spontaneously, she or he was prompted by "What else happened?" Finally, the prompted request "When did X?" was asked (X referring to the second action component of the event). The results showed that prompting better revealed the ability of the children, especially that of the younger ones, to use temporal conjunctions in complex sentences, as well as the delicate interplay of language skills and their flexible use.
Readability and writing style analysis of selected allied health professional journals.
Hedl, J J; Glazer-Waldman, H R; Parker, H J; Hopkins, K M
1991-01-01
Using US Department of Defense text sampling procedures, nine allied health journals were analyzed for readability and selected writing style indices via Right Writer, a commercial software program. Two indices of readability were computed for each journal as were several indices of writing style. The computed readability ranged from 13.0 to 15.4, depending upon the journal in question. Two journals showed the highest levels of readability (15.4) compared to the other seven journals. The writing style analyses indicated generally normal ranges for the descriptive and jargon indices, but seven journals showed below recommended strength indices. Sentence structure analyses indicated a need to reduce sentence structure complexity. Implications for journal editors and authors are discussed.
Adaptive significance of right hemisphere activation in aphasic language comprehension
Meltzer, Jed A.; Wagage, Suraji; Ryder, Jennifer; Solomon, Beth; Braun, Allen R.
2013-01-01
Aphasic patients often exhibit increased right hemisphere activity during language tasks. This may represent takeover of function by regions homologous to the left-hemisphere language networks, maladaptive interference, or adaptation of alternate compensatory strategies. To distinguish between these accounts, we tested language comprehension in 25 aphasic patients using an online sentence-picture matching paradigm while measuring brain activation with MEG. Linguistic conditions included semantically irreversible (“The boy is eating the apple”) and reversible (“The boy is pushing the girl”) sentences at three levels of syntactic complexity. As expected, patients performed well above chance on irreversible sentences, and at chance on reversible sentences of high complexity. Comprehension of reversible non-complex sentences ranged from nearly perfect to chance, and was highly correlated with offline measures of language comprehension. Lesion analysis revealed that comprehension deficits for reversible sentences were predicted by damage to the left temporal lobe. Although aphasic patients activated homologous areas in the right temporal lobe, such activation was not correlated with comprehension performance. Rather, patients with better comprehension exhibited increased activity in dorsal fronto-parietal regions. Correlations between performance and dorsal network activity occurred bilaterally during perception of sentences, and in the right hemisphere during a post-sentence memory delay. These results suggest that effortful reprocessing of perceived sentences in short-term memory can support improved comprehension in aphasia, and that strategic recruitment of alternative networks, rather than homologous takeover, may account for some findings of right hemisphere language activation in aphasia. PMID:23566891
Graphic Display of Larger Sentence Dependency Structures.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Craven, Timothy C.
1991-01-01
Outlines desirable qualities for graphic representation of sentence dependency structures in texts more than a few sentences in length. Several different display formats prototyped in the TEXNET experimental text structure management system are described, illustrated, and compared, and automatic structure manipulations are discussed. (36…
Planning in sentence production: Evidence for the phrase as a default planning scope
Martin, Randi C.; Crowther, Jason E.; Knight, Meredith; Tamborello, Franklin P.; Yang, Chin-Lung
2010-01-01
Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are consistent with a phrasal scope of planning, they might also be explained on the basis of: 1) greater retrieval fluency for the second content word in the simple initial noun phrase sentences and 2) visual grouping factors. In Experiments 1 and 2, retrieval fluency for the second content word was equated for the complex and simple initial noun phrase conditions. Experiments 3 and 4 addressed the visual grouping hypothesis by using stationary displays and by comparing onset latencies for the same display for sentence and list productions. Longer onset latencies for the sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase were obtained in all experiments, supporting the phrasal scope of planning hypothesis. The results indicate that in speech, as in other motor production domains, planning occurs beyond the minimal production unit. PMID:20501338
Lee, Jiyeon; Yoshida, Masaya; Thompson, Cynthia K
2015-08-01
Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia produce sentences word by word without advanced planning or whether hierarchical syntactic structure (i.e., verb argument structure; VAS) is encoded as part of the advanced planning unit. Experiment 1 examined production of sentences with a predefined structure (i.e., "The A and the B are above the C") using eye tracking. Experiment 2 tested production of transitive and unaccusative sentences without a predefined sentence structure in a verb-priming study. In Experiment 1, both speakers with agrammatic aphasia and young and age-matched control speakers used word-by-word strategies, selecting the first lemma (noun A) only prior to speech onset. However, in Experiment 2, unlike controls, speakers with agrammatic aphasia preplanned transitive and unaccusative sentences, encoding VAS before speech onset. Speakers with agrammatic aphasia show incremental, word-by-word production for structurally simple sentences, requiring retrieval of multiple noun lemmas. However, when sentences involve functional (thematic to grammatical) structure building, advanced planning strategies (i.e., VAS encoding) are used. This early use of hierarchical syntactic information may provide a scaffold for impaired GE in agrammatism.
Predicted Errors In Children's Early Sentence Comprehension
Gertner, Yael; Fisher, Cynthia
2012-01-01
Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the set of nouns occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This account predicts early successes, but also telltale errors: Toddlers should be unable to tell transitive sentences from other sentences containing two nouns. In testing this prediction, we capitalized on evidence that 21-month-olds use what they have learned about noun order in English sentences to understand new transitive verbs. In two experiments, 21-month-olds applied this noun-order knowledge to two-noun intransitive sentences, mistakenly assigning different interpretations to “The boy and the girl are gorping!” and “The girl and the boy are gorping!”. This suggests that toddlers exploit partial representations of sentence structure to guide sentence interpretation; these sparse representations are useful, but error-prone. PMID:22525312
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Poll, Gerard H.; Miller, Carol A.; van Hell, Janet G.
2016-01-01
Purpose: We asked whether sentence repetition accuracy could be explained by interactions of participant processing limitations with the structures of the sentences. We also tested a prediction of the procedural deficit hypothesis (Ullman & Pierpont, 2005) that adjuncts are more difficult than arguments for individuals with developmental…
A Frequency-List of Sentence Structures: Distribution of Kernel Sentences
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Geens, Dirk
1974-01-01
A corpus of 10,000 sentences extracted from British theatrical texts was used to construct a frequency list of kernel sentence structures. Thirty-one charts illustrate the analyzed results. The procedures used and an interpretation of the frequencies are given. Such lists might aid foreign language teachers in course organization. Available from…
The Processing of Extraposed Structures in English
Levy, Roger; Fedorenko, Evelina; Breen, Mara; Gibson, Ted
2012-01-01
In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are PROJECTIVE: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are NON-PROJECTIVE: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more computationally complex than projective dependencies; hence, it is of natural interest to investigate whether there are any processing costs specific to non-projective dependencies, and whether factors known to influence processing of projective dependencies also affect non-projective dependency processing. We report three self-paced reading studies, together with corpus and sentence completion studies, investigating the comprehension difficulty associated with the non-projective dependencies created by the extraposition of relative clauses in English. We find that extraposition over either verbs or prepositional phrases creates comprehension difficulty, and that this difficulty is consistent with probabilistic syntactic expectations estimated from corpora. Furthermore, we find that manipulating the expectation that a given noun will have a postmodifying relative clause can modulate and even neutralize the difficulty associated with extraposition. Our experiments rule out accounts based purely on derivational complexity and/or dependency locality in terms of linear positioning. Our results demonstrate that comprehenders maintain probabilistic syntactic expectations that persist beyond projective-dependency structures, and suggest that it may be possible to explain observed patterns of comprehension difficulty associated with extraposition entirely through probabilistic expectations. PMID:22035959
Proactive interference effects on sentence production
FERREIRA, VICTOR S.; FIRATO, CARLA E.
2007-01-01
Proactive interference refers to recall difficulties caused by prior similar memory-related processing. Information-processing approaches to sentence production predict that retrievability affects sentence form: Speakers may word sentences so that material that is difficult to retrieve is spoken later. In this experiment, speakers produced sentence structures that could include an optional that, thereby delaying the mention of a subsequent noun phrase. This subsequent noun phrase was either (1) conceptually similar to three previous noun phrases in the same sentence, leading to greater proactive interference, or (2) conceptually dissimilar, leading to less proactive interference. Speakers produced more thats (and were more disfluencies) before conceptually similar noun phrases, suggesting that retrieval difficulties during sentence production affect the syntactic structures of sentences that speakers produce. PMID:12613685
Planning in sentence production: evidence for the phrase as a default planning scope.
Martin, Randi C; Crowther, Jason E; Knight, Meredith; Tamborello, Franklin P; Yang, Chin-Lung
2010-08-01
Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are consistent with a phrasal scope of planning, they might also be explained on the basis of: (1) greater retrieval fluency for the second content word in the simple initial noun phrase sentences and (2) visual grouping factors. In Experiments 1 and 2, retrieval fluency for the second content word was equated for the complex and simple initial noun phrase conditions. Experiments 3 and 4 addressed the visual grouping hypothesis by using stationary displays and by comparing onset latencies for the same display for sentence and list productions. Longer onset latencies for the sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase were obtained in all experiments, supporting the phrasal scope of planning hypothesis. The results indicate that in speech, as in other motor production domains, planning occurs beyond the minimal production unit. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Effects of irrelevant sounds on phonological coding in reading comprehension and short-term memory.
Boyle, R; Coltheart, V
1996-05-01
The effects of irrelevant sounds on reading comprehension and short-term memory were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, adults judged the acceptability of written sentences during irrelevant speech, accompanied and unaccompanied singing, instrumental music, and in silence. Sentences varied in syntactic complexity: Simple sentences contained a right-branching relative clause (The applause pleased the woman that gave the speech) and syntactically complex sentences included a centre-embedded relative clause (The hay that the farmer stored fed the hungry animals). Unacceptable sentences either sounded acceptable (The dog chased the cat that eight up all his food) or did not (The man praised the child that sight up his spinach). Decision accuracy was impaired by syntactic complexity but not by irrelevant sounds. Phonological coding was indicated by increased errors on unacceptable sentences that sounded correct. These errors rates were unaffected by irrelevant sounds. Experiment 2 examined effects of irrelevant sounds on ordered recall of phonologically similar and dissimilar word lists. Phonological similarity impaired recall. Irrelevant speech reduced recall but did not interact with phonological similarity. The results of these experiments question assumptions about the relationship between speech input and phonological coding in reading and the short-term store.
Complex Sentence Profiles in Children with Specific Language Impairment: Are They Really Atypical?
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Riches, Nick G.
2017-01-01
Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have language difficulties of unknown origin. Syntactic profiles are atypical, with poor performance on non-canonical structures, e.g. object relatives, suggesting a localized deficit. However, existing analyses using ANOVAs are problematic because they do not systematically address unequal…
Effects of Noun Phrase Type on Sentence Complexity
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Gordon, Peter C.; Hendrick, Randall; Johnson, Marcus
2004-01-01
A series of self-paced reading time experiments was performed to assess how characteristics of noun phrases (NPs) contribute to the difference in processing difficulty between object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Structural semantic characteristics of the NP in the embedded clause (definite vs. indefinite and definite vs. generic) did…
Automatically Generating Reading Comprehension Look-Back Strategy: Questions from Expository Texts
2008-05-14
34t"> <sentence string="Copyright 1997, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation" id=Ŕ" indent="c"> <sentence string="The six hundred mostly Inuit residents...Sentence: The Inuit children were killed by a storm on April 10. Question: When were the Inuit children killed by a storm? Additionally...questions formed from complex sentences are simplified during transformation. For example, in the following sentence, the Inuit children killed in the
The network of concepts in written texts
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Caldeira, S. M. G.; Petit Lobão, T. C.; Andrade, R. F. S.; Neme, A.; Miranda, J. G. V.
2006-02-01
Complex network theory is used to investigate the structure of meaningful concepts in written texts of individual authors. Networks have been constructed after a two phase filtering, where words with less meaning contents are eliminated and all remaining words are set to their canonical form, without any number, gender or time flexion. Each sentence in the text is added to the network as a clique. A large number of written texts have been scrutinised, and it is found that texts have small-world as well as scale-free structures. The growth process of these networks has also been investigated, and a universal evolution of network quantifiers have been found among the set of texts written by distinct authors. Further analyses, based on shuffling procedures taken either on the texts or on the constructed networks, provide hints on the role played by the word frequency and sentence length distributions to the network structure.
Memory for non-native language: the role of lexical processing in the retention of surface form.
Sampaio, Cristina; Konopka, Agnieszka E
2013-01-01
Research on memory for native language (L1) has consistently shown that retention of surface form is inferior to that of gist (e.g., Sachs, 1967). This paper investigates whether the same pattern is found in memory for non-native language (L2). We apply a model of bilingual word processing to more complex linguistic structures and predict that memory for L2 sentences ought to contain more surface information than L1 sentences. Native and non-native speakers of English were tested on a set of sentence pairs with different surface forms but the same meaning (e.g., "The bullet hit/struck the bull's eye"). Memory for these sentences was assessed with a cued recall procedure. Responses showed that native and non-native speakers did not differ in the accuracy of gist-based recall but that non-native speakers outperformed native speakers in the retention of surface form. The results suggest that L2 processing involves more intensive encoding of lexical level information than L1 processing.
Activations of "Motor" and Other Non-Language Structures during Sentence Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Stowe, Laurie A.; Paans, Anne M. J.; Wijers, Albertus A.; Zwarts, Frans
2004-01-01
In this paper we report the results of an experiment in which subjects read syntactically unambiguous and ambiguous sentences which were disambiguated after several words to the less likely possibility. Understanding such sentences involves building an initial structure, inhibiting the non-preferred structure, detecting that later input is…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Witzel, Jeffrey; Witzel, Naoko
2016-01-01
This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested--simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing…
Functional Sentence Perspective and Composition.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Vande Kopple, William J.
Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Dick, Frederic; Wulfeck, Beverly; Krupa-Kwiatkowski, Magda; Bates, Elizabeth
2004-01-01
This study compared sentence comprehension skills in typically developing children 5-17 years of age, children with language impairment (LI) and children with focal brain injuries (FL) acquired in the pre/perinatal period. Participants were asked to process sentences "on-line", choosing the agent in sentences that varied in syntactic complexity…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Witzel, Jeffrey; Witzel, Naoko; Nicol, Janet
2012-01-01
This study examines the reading patterns of native speakers (NSs) and high-level (Chinese) nonnative speakers (NNSs) on three English sentence types involving temporarily ambiguous structural configurations. The reading patterns on each sentence type indicate that both NSs and NNSs were biased toward specific structural interpretations. These…
Condensed Representation of Sentences in Graphic Displays of Text Structures.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Craven, Timothy C.
1990-01-01
Discusses ways in which sentences may be represented in a condensed form in graphic displays of a sentence dependency structure. A prototype of a text structure management system, TEXNET, is described; a quantitative evaluation of automatic abbreviation schemes is presented; full-text compression is discussed; and additional research is suggested.…
Tun, Patricia A; Benichov, Jonathan; Wingfield, Arthur
2010-09-01
Older adults with good hearing and with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were tested for comprehension of spoken sentences that required perceptual effort (hearing speech at lower sound levels), and two degrees of cognitive load (sentences with simpler or more complex syntax). Although comprehension accuracy was equivalent for both participant groups and for young adults with good hearing, hearing loss was associated with longer response latencies to the correct comprehension judgments, especially for complex sentences heard at relatively low amplitudes. These findings demonstrate the need to take into account both sensory and cognitive demands of speech materials in older adults' language comprehension. (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.
Structural Priming and Frequency Effects Interact in Chinese Sentence Comprehension
Wei, Hang; Dong, Yanping; Boland, Julie E.; Yuan, Fang
2016-01-01
Previous research in several European languages has shown that the language processing system is sensitive to both structural frequency and structural priming effects. However, it is currently not clear whether these two types of effects interact during online sentence comprehension, especially for languages that do not have morphological markings. To explore this issue, the present study investigated the possible interplay between structural priming and frequency effects for sentences containing the Chinese ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2 in a self-paced reading experiment. The sentences were disambiguated to either the more frequent/preferred NP structure or the less frequent VP structure. Each target sentence was preceded by a prime sentence of three possible types: NP primes, VP primes, and neutral primes. When the ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2 was disambiguated to the dispreferred VP structure, participants experienced more processing difficulty following an NP prime relative to following a VP prime or a neutral baseline. When the ambiguity was resolved to the preferred NP structure, prime type had no effect. These results suggest that structural priming in comprehension is modulated by the baseline frequency of alternative structures, with the less frequent structure being more subject to structural priming effects. These results are discussed in the context of the error-based, implicit learning account of structural priming. PMID:26869954
The influence of sense-contingent argument structure frequencies on ambiguity resolution in aphasia.
Huck, Anneline; Thompson, Robin L; Cruice, Madeline; Marshall, Jane
2017-06-01
Verbs with multiple senses can show varying argument structure frequencies, depending on the underlying sense. When acknowledge is used to mean 'recognise', it takes a direct object (DO), but when it is used to mean 'admit' it prefers a sentence complement (SC). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether people with aphasia (PWA) can exploit such meaning-structure probabilities during the reading of temporarily ambiguous sentences, as demonstrated for neurologically healthy individuals (NHI) in a self-paced reading study (Hare et al., 2003). Eleven people with mild or moderate aphasia and eleven neurologically healthy control participants read sentences while their eyes were tracked. Using adapted materials from the study by Hare et al. target sentences containing an SC structure (e.g. He acknowledged (that) his friends would probably help him a lot) were presented following a context prime that biased either a direct object (DO-bias) or sentence complement (SC-bias) reading of the verbs. Half of the stimuli sentences did not contain that so made the post verbal noun phrase (his friends) structurally ambiguous. Both groups of participants were influenced by structural ambiguity as well as by the context bias, indicating that PWA can, like NHI, use their knowledge of a verb's sense-based argument structure frequency during online sentence reading. However, the individuals with aphasia showed delayed reading patterns and some individual differences in their sensitivity to context and ambiguity cues. These differences compared to the NHI may contribute to difficulties in sentence comprehension in aphasia. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Smith, Anne; Weber, Christine
2017-01-01
Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine if indices of speech motor coordination during the production of sentences varying in sentence length and syntactic complexity were associated with stuttering persistence versus recovery in 5- to 7-year-old children. Methods We compared children with persistent stuttering (CWS-Per) with children who had recovered (CWS-Rec), and children who do not stutter (CWNS). A kinematic measure of articulatory coordination, lip aperture variability (LAVar), and overall movement duration were computed for perceptually fluent sentence productions varying in length and syntactic complexity. Results CWS-Per exhibited higher LAVar across sentence types compared to CWS-Rec and CWNS. For the participants who successfully completed the experimental paradigm, the demands of increasing sentence length and syntactic complexity did not appear to disproportionately affect the speech motor coordination of CWS-Per compared to their recovered and fluent peers. However, a subset of CWS-Per failed to produce the required number of accurate utterances. Conclusions These findings support our hypothesis that the speech motor coordination of school-age CWS-Per, on average, is less refined and less mature compared to CWS-Rec and CWNS. Childhood recovery from stuttering is characterized, in part, by overcoming an earlier occurring maturational lag in speech motor development. PMID:28056137
Using sentence combining in technical writing classes
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
Rosner, M.; Paul, T.
1981-01-01
Sentence combining exercises are advanced as a way to teach technical writing style without reliance upon abstractions, from which students do not learn. Such exercises: (1) give students regular writing practice; (2) teach the logic of sentence structure, sentence editing, and punctuation; (3) paragraph development and organization; and (4) rhetorical stance. Typical sentence, paragraph, and discourse level sentence combining exercises are described.
Predicting complex syntactic structure in real time: Processing of negative sentences in Russian.
Kazanina, Nina
2017-11-01
In Russian negative sentences the verb's direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific "genitive-of-negation" phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed for anticipating syntactic structure, and whether lexical heads other than the verb can be predicted on the basis of a case-marked noun phrase. Experiment 1, a completion task, confirmed that genitive-of-negation is part of Russian speakers' active grammatical repertoire. In Experiments 2 and 3, the genitive/accusative case manipulation on the preverbal object led to shorter reading times at the negation and verb in the genitive versus accusative condition. Furthermore, Experiment 3 manipulated linear order of the direct object and the negated verb in order to distinguish whether the abovementioned facilitatory effect was predictive or integrative in nature, and concluded that the parser actively predicts a verb and (otherwise optional) negation on the basis of a preceding genitive-marked object. Similarly to a head-final language, case-marking information on preverbal noun phrases (NPs) is used by the parser to enable incremental structure building in a free-word-order language such as Russian.
Michael, E B; Keller, T A; Carpenter, P A; Just, M A
2001-08-01
The neural substrate underlying reading vs. listening comprehension of sentences was compared using fMRI. One way in which this issue was addressed was by comparing the patterns of activation particularly in cortical association areas that classically are implicated in language processing. The precise locations of the activation differed between the two modalities. In the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca's area), the activation associated with listening was more anterior and inferior than the activation associated with reading, suggesting more semantic processing during listening comprehension. In the left posterior superior and middle temporal region (roughly, Wernicke's area), the activation for listening was closer to primary auditory cortex (more anterior and somewhat more lateral) than the activation for reading. In several regions, the activation was much more left lateralized for reading than for listening. In addition to differences in the location of the activation, there were also differences in the total amount of activation in the two modalities in several regions. A second way in which the modality comparison was addressed was by examining how the neural systems responded to comprehension workload in the two modalities by systematically varying the structural complexity of the sentences to be processed. Here, the distribution of the workload increase associated with the processing of additional structural complexity was very similar across the two input modalities. The results suggest a number of subtle differences in the cognitive processing underlying listening vs. reading comprehension. Copyright 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Role of Working Memory in Typically Developing Children's Complex Sentence Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Montgomery, James W.; Magimairaj, Beula M.; O'Malley, Michelle H.
2008-01-01
The influence of three mechanisms of working memory (phonological short-term memory (PSTM capacity), attentional resource control/allocation, and processing speed) on children's complex (and simple) sentence comprehension was investigated. Fifty two children (6-12 years) completed a nonword repetition task (indexing PSTM), concurrent verbal…
Sentence Complexity and Working Memory Effects in Ambiguity Resolution
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kim, Ji Hyon; Christianson, Kiel
2013-01-01
Two self-paced reading experiments using a paraphrase decision task paradigm were performed to investigate how sentence complexity contributed to the relative clause (RC) attachment preferences of speakers of different working memory capacities (WMCs). Experiment 1 (English) showed working memory effects on relative clause processing in both…
Sentence comprehension following moderate closed head injury in adults.
Leikin, Mark; Ibrahim, Raphiq; Aharon-Peretz, Judith
2012-09-01
The current study explores sentence comprehension impairments among adults following moderate closed head injury. It was hypothesized that if the factor of syntactic complexity significantly affects sentence comprehension in these patients, it would testify to the existence of syntactic processing deficit along with working-memory problems. Thirty-six adults (18 closed head injury patients and 18 healthy controls matched in age, gender, and IQ) participated in the study. A picture-sentence matching task together with various tests for memory, language, and reading abilities were used to explore whether sentence comprehension impairments exist as a result of a deficit in syntactic processing or of working-memory dysfunction. Results indicate significant impairment in sentence comprehension among adults with closed head injury compared with their non-head-injured peers. Results also reveal that closed head injury patients demonstrate considerable decline in working memory, short-term memory, and semantic knowledge. Analysis of the results shows that memory impairment and syntactic complexity contribute significantly to sentence comprehension difficulties in closed head injury patients. At the same time, the presentation mode (spoken or written language) was found to have no effect on comprehension among adults with closed head injury, and their reading abilities appear to be relatively intact.
Syntactic Priming during Sentence Comprehension: Evidence for the Lexical Boost
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Traxler, Matthew J.; Tooley, Kristen M.; Pickering, Martin J.
2014-01-01
Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The…
Reporter Concerns in 300 Mode-Related Incident Reports from NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
McGreevy, Michael W.
1996-01-01
A model has been developed which represents prominent reporter concerns expressed in the narratives of 300 mode-related incident reports from NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The model objectively quantifies the structure of concerns which persist across situations and reporters. These concerns are described and illustrated using verbatim sentences from the original narratives. Report accession numbers are included with each sentence so that concerns can be traced back to the original reports. The results also include an inventory of mode names mentioned in the narratives, and a comparison of individual and joint concerns. The method is based on a proximity-weighted co-occurrence metric and object-oriented complexity reduction.
The Influence of Topic Status on Written and Spoken Sentence Production
Cowles, H. Wind; Ferreira, Victor S.
2012-01-01
Four experiments investigate the influence of topic status and givenness on how speakers and writers structure sentences. The results of these experiments show that when a referent is previously given, it is more likely to be produced early in both sentences and word lists, confirming prior work showing that givenness increases the accessibility of given referents. When a referent is previously given and assigned topic status, it is even more likely to be produced early in a sentence, but not in a word list. Thus, there appears to be an early mention advantage for topics that is present in both written and spoken modalities, but is specific to sentence production. These results suggest that information-structure constructs like topic exert an influence that is not based only on increased accessibility, but also reflects mapping to syntactic structure during sentence production. PMID:22408281
Event-related brain potentials index cue-based retrieval interference during sentence comprehension.
Martin, Andrea E; Nieuwland, Mante S; Carreiras, Manuel
2012-01-16
Successful language use requires access to products of past processing within an evolving discourse. A central issue for any neurocognitive theory of language then concerns the role of memory variables during language processing. Under a cue-based retrieval account of language comprehension, linguistic dependency resolution (e.g., retrieving antecedents) is subject to interference from other information in the sentence, especially information that occurs between the words that form the dependency (e.g., between the antecedent and the retrieval site). Retrieval interference may then shape processing complexity as a function of the match of the information at retrieval with the antecedent versus other recent or similar items in memory. To address these issues, we studied the online processing of ellipsis in Castilian Spanish, a language with morphological gender agreement. We recorded event-related brain potentials while participants read sentences containing noun-phrase ellipsis indicated by the determiner otro/a ('another'). These determiners had a grammatically correct or incorrect gender with respect to their antecedent nouns that occurred earlier in the sentence. Moreover, between each antecedent and determiner, another noun phrase occurred that was structurally unavailable as an antecedent and that matched or mismatched the gender of the antecedent (i.e., a local agreement attractor). In contrast to extant P600 results on agreement violation processing, and inconsistent with predictions from neurocognitive models of sentence processing, grammatically incorrect determiners evoked a sustained, broadly distributed negativity compared to correct ones between 400 and 1000ms after word onset, possibly related to sustained negativities as observed for referential processing difficulties. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the attractor: an increased negativity was observed for grammatically correct determiners that did not match the gender of the attractor, suggesting that structurally unavailable noun phrases were at least temporarily considered for grammatically correct ellipsis. These results constitute the first ERP evidence for cue-based retrieval interference during comprehension of grammatical sentences. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Parametric Effects of Syntactic-Semantic Conflict in Broca's Area during Sentence Processing
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Thothathiri, Malathi; Kim, Albert; Trueswell, John C.; Thompson-Schill, Sharon L.
2012-01-01
The hypothesized role of Broca's area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional…
Planning in Sentence Production: Evidence for the Phrase as a Default Planning Scope
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Martin, Randi C.; Crowther, Jason E.; Knight, Meredith; Tamborello, Franklin P., II; Yang, Chin-Lung
2010-01-01
Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…
A Realist Evaluation Approach to Unpacking the Impacts of the Sentencing Guidelines
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hunt, Kim Steven; Sridharan, Sanjeev
2010-01-01
Evaluations of complex interventions such as sentencing guidelines provide an opportunity to understand the mechanisms by which policies and programs can impact intermediate and long-term outcomes. There is limited previous discussion of the underlying frameworks by which sentencing guidelines can impact outcomes such as crime rates. Guided by a…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Furey, William M.; Marcotte, Amanda M.; Wells, Craig S.; Hintze, John M.
2017-01-01
The Language and Writing strands of the Common Core State Standards place a heavy emphasis on sentence-level conventions including syntax/grammar and mechanics. Interventions targeting these foundational skills are necessary to support struggling writers, as poorly developed sentence construction skills inhibit more complex writing tasks. This…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Scholes, Robert J.; And Others
The effects of sentence imitation and picture verification on the recall of subsequent digits were studied. Stimuli consisted of 20 sentences, each sentence followed by a string of five digit names, and five structural types of sentences were presented. Subjects were instructed to listen to the sentence and digit string and then either immediately…
Grammatical Encoding and Learning in Agrammatic Aphasia: Evidence from Structural Priming
Cho-Reyes, Soojin; Mack, Jennifer E.; Thompson, Cynthia K.
2017-01-01
The present study addressed open questions about the nature of sentence production deficits in agrammatic aphasia. In two structural priming experiments, 13 aphasic and 13 age-matched control speakers repeated visually- and auditorily-presented prime sentences, and then used visually-presented word arrays to produce dative sentences. Experiment 1 examined whether agrammatic speakers form structural and thematic representations during sentence production, whereas Experiment 2 tested the lasting effects of structural priming in lags of two and four sentences. Results of Experiment 1 showed that, like unimpaired speakers, the aphasic speakers evinced intact structural priming effects, suggesting that they are able to generate such representations. Unimpaired speakers also evinced reliable thematic priming effects, whereas agrammatic speakers did so in some experimental conditions, suggesting that access to thematic representations may be intact. Results of Experiment 2 showed structural priming effects of comparable magnitude for aphasic and unimpaired speakers. In addition, both groups showed lasting structural priming effects in both lag conditions, consistent with implicit learning accounts. In both experiments, aphasic speakers with more severe language impairments exhibited larger priming effects, consistent with the “inverse preference” prediction of implicit learning accounts. The findings indicate that agrammatic speakers are sensitive to structural priming across levels of representation and that such effects are lasting, suggesting that structural priming may be beneficial for the treatment of sentence production deficits in agrammatism. PMID:28924328
A No-Grammar Approach to Sentence Power: John C. Mellon's Sentence-Combining Games.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Cooper, Charles R.
1971-01-01
This study is concerned with increasing the rate at which children progress toward more highly differentiated sentence structure. The study recommends sentence-combining practices that will accelerate this progress. The two main purposes of grammar study have been to prevent errors in writing and to present the full range of sentence structures…
An Analysis of "Rank-Shift" of Compound Complex Sentence Translation
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Widarwati, Nunun Tri
2015-01-01
The focus of the research is to describe the "rank-shift" of compound complex sentence translation in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix novel translation by Listiana Srisanti and also to describe the accuracy of those translation. This research belongs to qualitative descriptive research which document and informants are being…
Masking effects of speech and music: does the masker's hierarchical structure matter?
Shi, Lu-Feng; Law, Yvonne
2010-04-01
Speech and music are time-varying signals organized by parallel hierarchical rules. Through a series of four experiments, this study compared the masking effects of single-talker speech and instrumental music on speech perception while manipulating the complexity of hierarchical and temporal structures of the maskers. Listeners' word recognition was found to be similar between hierarchically intact and disrupted speech or classical music maskers (Experiment 1). When sentences served as the signal, significantly greater masking effects were observed with disrupted than intact speech or classical music maskers (Experiment 2), although not with jazz or serial music maskers, which differed from the classical music masker in their hierarchical structures (Experiment 3). Removing the classical music masker's temporal dynamics or partially restoring it affected listeners' sentence recognition; yet, differences in performance between intact and disrupted maskers remained robust (Experiment 4). Hence, the effect of structural expectancy was largely present across maskers when comparing them before and after their hierarchical structure was purposefully disrupted. This effect seemed to lend support to the auditory stream segregation theory.
Gillam, Ronald B.; Evans, Julia L.; Sergeev, Alexander V.
2017-01-01
Purpose With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared the comprehension error patterns of the groups. Method Using a “Whatdunit” agent selection task, 117 children with SLI and 117 TD children (ages 7:0–11:11, years:months) propensity matched on age, gender, mother's education, and family income pointed to the picture that best represented the agent in semantically implausible canonical structures (subject–verb–object, subject relative) and noncanonical structures (passive, object relative). Results The SLI group performed worse than the TD group across sentence types. TD children demonstrated developmental improvement across each sentence type, but children with SLI showed improvement only for canonical sentences. Both groups chose the object noun as agent significantly more often than the noun appearing in a prepositional phrase. Conclusions In the absence of semantic–pragmatic cues, comprehension of canonical and noncanonical sentences by children with SLI is limited, with noncanonical sentence comprehension being disproportionately limited. The children's ability to make proper semantic role assignments to the noun arguments in sentences, especially noncanonical, is significantly hindered. PMID:28832884
The Structural Characteristics and On-line Comprehension of Experiencer-Verb Sentences.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Cupples, Linda
2002-01-01
Examined how skilled adult readers assign meaning to sentences. Of particular interest were sentences containing "experiencer" verbs, which describe states or emotions rather than actions. Subjects were university students in Australia. Test items were semantically implausible sentences. (Author/VWL)
Neural Measures Reveal Implicit Learning during Language Processing.
Batterink, Laura J; Cheng, Larry Y; Paller, Ken A
2016-10-01
Language input is highly variable; phonological, lexical, and syntactic features vary systematically across different speakers, geographic regions, and social contexts. Previous evidence shows that language users are sensitive to these contextual changes and that they can rapidly adapt to local regularities. For example, listeners quickly adjust to accented speech, facilitating comprehension. It has been proposed that this type of adaptation is a form of implicit learning. This study examined a similar type of adaptation, syntactic adaptation, to address two issues: (1) whether language comprehenders are sensitive to a subtle probabilistic contingency between an extraneous feature (font color) and syntactic structure and (2) whether this sensitivity should be attributed to implicit learning. Participants read a large set of sentences, 40% of which were garden-path sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Critically, but unbeknownst to participants, font color probabilistically predicted the presence of a garden-path structure, with 75% of garden-path sentences (and 25% of normative sentences) appearing in a given font color. ERPs were recorded during sentence processing. Almost all participants indicated no conscious awareness of the relationship between font color and sentence structure. Nonetheless, after sufficient time to learn this relationship, ERPs time-locked to the point of syntactic ambiguity resolution in garden-path sentences differed significantly as a function of font color. End-of-sentence grammaticality judgments were also influenced by font color, suggesting that a match between font color and sentence structure increased processing fluency. Overall, these findings indicate that participants can implicitly detect subtle co-occurrences between physical features of sentences and abstract, syntactic properties, supporting the notion that implicit learning mechanisms are generally operative during online language processing.
Thothathiri, Malathi; Kimberg, Daniel Y.; Schwartz, Myrna F.
2012-01-01
We explored the neural basis of reversible sentence comprehension in a large group of aphasic patients (N=79). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping revealed a significant association between damage in temporoparietal cortex and impaired sentence comprehension. This association remained after we controlled for phonological working memory. We hypothesize that this region plays an important role in the thematic or what-where processing of sentences. In contrast, we detected weak or no association between reversible sentence comprehension and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which includes Broca’s area, even for syntactically complex sentences. This casts doubt on theories that presuppose a critical role for this region in syntactic computations. PMID:21861679
Network modulation during complex syntactic processing
den Ouden, Dirk-Bart; Saur, Dorothee; Mader, Wolfgang; Schelter, Björn; Lukic, Sladjana; Wali, Eisha; Timmer, Jens; Thompson, Cynthia K.
2011-01-01
Complex sentence processing is supported by a left-lateralized neural network including inferior frontal cortex and posterior superior temporal cortex. This study investigates the pattern of connectivity and information flow within this network. We used fMRI BOLD data derived from 12 healthy participants reported in an earlier study (Thompson, C. K., Den Ouden, D. B., Bonakdarpour, B., Garibaldi, K., & Parrish, T. B. (2010b). Neural plasticity and treatment-induced recovery of sentence processing in agrammatism. Neuropsychologia, 48(11), 3211-3227) to identify activation peaks associated with object-cleft over syntactically less complex subject-cleft processing. Directed Partial Correlation Analysis was conducted on time series extracted from participant-specific activation peaks and showed evidence of functional connectivity between four regions, linearly between premotor cortex, inferior frontal gyrus, posterior superior temporal sulcus and anterior middle temporal gyrus. This pattern served as the basis for Dynamic Causal Modeling of networks with a driving input to posterior superior temporal cortex, which likely supports thematic role assignment, and networks with a driving input to inferior frontal cortex, a core region associated with syntactic computation. The optimal model was determined through both frequentist and Bayesian model selection and turned out to reflect a network with a primary drive from inferior frontal cortex and modulation of the connection between inferior frontal and posterior superior temporal cortex by complex sentence processing. The winning model also showed a substantive role for a feedback mechanism from posterior superior temporal cortex back to inferior frontal cortex. We suggest that complex syntactic processing is driven by word-order analysis, supported by inferior frontal cortex, in an interactive relation with posterior superior temporal cortex, which supports verb argument structure processing. PMID:21820518
A Deficit in Movement-Derived Sentences in German-Speaking Hearing-Impaired Children
Ruigendijk, Esther; Friedmann, Naama
2017-01-01
Children with hearing impairment (HI) show disorders in syntax and morphology. The question is whether and how these disorders are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The aim of this paper is to examine whether moderate to severe hearing loss at a young age affects the ability of German-speaking orally trained children to understand and produce sentences. We focused on sentence structures that are derived by syntactic movement, which have been identified as a sensitive marker for syntactic impairment in other languages and in other populations with syntactic impairment. Therefore, our study tested subject and object relatives, subject and object Wh-questions, passive sentences, and topicalized sentences, as well as sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. We tested 19 HI children aged 9;5–13;6 and compared their performance with hearing children using comprehension tasks of sentence-picture matching and sentence repetition tasks. For the comprehension tasks, we included HI children who passed an auditory discrimination task; for the sentence repetition tasks, we selected children who passed a screening task of simple sentence repetition without lip-reading; this made sure that they could perceive the words in the tests, so that we could test their grammatical abilities. The results clearly showed that most of the participants with HI had considerable difficulties in the comprehension and repetition of sentences with syntactic movement: they had significant difficulties understanding object relatives, Wh-questions, and topicalized sentences, and in the repetition of object who and which questions and subject relatives, as well as in sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. Repetition of passives was only problematic for some children. Object relatives were still difficult at this age for both HI and hearing children. An additional important outcome of the study is that not all sentence structures are impaired—passive structures were not problematic for most of the HI children PMID:28659836
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Fedorenko, Evelina; Gibson, Edward; Rohde, Douglas
2006-01-01
This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…
Investigating the Role of Verbal Working Memory in Young Children's Sentence Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Boyle, Whitney; Lindell, Annukka K.; Kidd, Evan
2013-01-01
This study considers the role of verbal working memory in sentence comprehension in typically developing English-speaking children. Fifty-six (N = 56) children aged 4;0-6;6 completed a test of language comprehension that contained sentences which varied in complexity, standardized tests of vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence, and three tests of…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Gordon, Peter C.; Hendrick, Randall; Johnson, Marcus; Lee, Yoonhyoung
2006-01-01
The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence …
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Johnson, Marcus L.; Lowder, Matthew W.; Gordon, Peter C.
2011-01-01
In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Pijnacker, Judith; Davids, Nina; van Weerdenburg, Marjolijn; Verhoeven, Ludo; Knoors, Harry; van Alphen, Petra
2017-01-01
Purpose: Given the complexity of sentence processing and the specific problems that children with specific language impairment (SLI) experience, we investigated the time course and characteristics of semantic processing at the sentence level in Dutch preschoolers with SLI. Method: We measured N400 responses to semantically congruent and…
Word Order and Linguistic Factors in the Second Language Processing of Spanish Passive Sentences
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lee, James F.
2017-01-01
The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…
Wagner, Valentin; Jescheniak, Jörg D; Schriefers, Herbert
2010-03-01
Three picture-word interference experiments addressed the question of whether the scope of grammatical advance planning in sentence production corresponds to some fixed unit or rather is flexible. Subjects produced sentences of different formats under varying amounts of cognitive load. When speakers described 2-object displays with simple sentences of the form "the frog is next to the mug," the 2 nouns were found to be lexically-semantically activated to similar degrees at speech onset, as indexed by similarly sized interference effects from semantic distractors related to either the first or the second noun. When speakers used more complex sentences (including prenominal color adjectives; e.g., "the blue frog is next to the blue mug") much larger interference effects were observed for the first than the second noun, suggesting that the second noun was lexically-semantically activated before speech onset on only a subset of trials. With increased cognitive load, introduced by an additional conceptual decision task and variable utterance formats, the interference effect for the first noun was increased and the interference effect for second noun disappeared, suggesting that the scope of advance planning had been narrowed. By contrast, if cognitive load was induced by a secondary working memory task to be performed during speech planning, the interference effect for both nouns was increased, suggesting that the scope of advance planning had not been affected. In all, the data suggest that the scope of advance planning during grammatical encoding in sentence production is flexible, rather than structurally fixed.
Using Neural Networks to Generate Inferential Roles for Natural Language
Blouw, Peter; Eliasmith, Chris
2018-01-01
Neural networks have long been used to study linguistic phenomena spanning the domains of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Of these domains, semantics is somewhat unique in that there is little clarity concerning what a model needs to be able to do in order to provide an account of how the meanings of complex linguistic expressions, such as sentences, are understood. We argue that one thing such models need to be able to do is generate predictions about which further sentences are likely to follow from a given sentence; these define the sentence's “inferential role.” We then show that it is possible to train a tree-structured neural network model to generate very simple examples of such inferential roles using the recently released Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset. On an empirical front, we evaluate the performance of this model by reporting entailment prediction accuracies on a set of test sentences not present in the training data. We also report the results of a simple study that compares human plausibility ratings for both human-generated and model-generated entailments for a random selection of sentences in this test set. On a more theoretical front, we argue in favor of a revision to some common assumptions about semantics: understanding a linguistic expression is not only a matter of mapping it onto a representation that somehow constitutes its meaning; rather, understanding a linguistic expression is mainly a matter of being able to draw certain inferences. Inference should accordingly be at the core of any model of semantic cognition. PMID:29387031
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Mobayyen, F.; de Almeida, R.G.
2005-01-01
One hundred and forty normal undergraduate students participated in a Proactive Interference (PI) experiment with sentences containing verbs from four different semantic and morphological classes (lexical causatives, morphological causatives, and morphologically complex and simplex perception verbs). Past research has shown significant PI build-up…
Association and Phrase Structure in Sentence Recall.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Rosenberg, Sheldon
The effect of within- and between-phrase normative controlled association and phrase structure upon word integration in sentence recall was studied in two experiments. The two experiments differed only with respect to the type of two-phrase sentence used. In both experiments, one group of subjects was given four study-test trials on a list of four…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Richter, Tobias
2006-01-01
Most reading time studies using naturalistic texts yield data sets characterized by a multilevel structure: Sentences (sentence level) are nested within persons (person level). In contrast to analysis of variance and multiple regression techniques, hierarchical linear models take the multilevel structure of reading time data into account. They…
Computer-Based Readability Testing of Information Booklets for German Cancer Patients.
Keinki, Christian; Zowalla, Richard; Pobiruchin, Monika; Huebner, Jutta; Wiesner, Martin
2018-04-12
Understandable health information is essential for treatment adherence and improved health outcomes. For readability testing, several instruments analyze the complexity of sentence structures, e.g., Flesch-Reading Ease (FRE) or Vienna-Formula (WSTF). Moreover, the vocabulary is of high relevance for readers. The aim of this study is to investigate the agreement of sentence structure and vocabulary-based (SVM) instruments. A total of 52 freely available German patient information booklets on cancer were collected from the Internet. The mean understandability level L was computed for 51 booklets. The resulting values of FRE, WSTF, and SVM were assessed pairwise for agreement with Bland-Altman plots and two-sided, paired t tests. For the pairwise comparison, the mean L values are L FRE = 6.81, L WSTF = 7.39, L SVM = 5.09. The sentence structure-based metrics gave significantly different scores (P < 0.001) for all assessed booklets, confirmed by the Bland-Altman analysis. The study findings suggest that vocabulary-based instruments cannot be interchanged with FRE/WSTF. However, both analytical aspects should be considered and checked by authors to linguistically refine texts with respect to the individual target group. Authors of health information can be supported by automated readability analysis. Health professionals can benefit by direct booklet comparisons allowing for time-effective selection of suitable booklets for patients.
A Study of the Speed of Understanding Sentences as a Function of Sentence Structure. Final Report.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Halamandaris, Pandelis G.
On the basis of the grammatical theory developed by Noam Chomsky, it is reasonable to presume that the different parts of a sentence may not all be understood with equal facility and speed. One purpose of this study was to determine whether some of the grammatical relations within a sentence were understood more readily than others. Sentences of…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Yeatman, Jason D.; Ben-Shachar, Michal; Glover, Gary H.; Feldman, Heidi M.
2010-01-01
The purpose of this study was to explore changes in activation of the cortical network that serves auditory sentence comprehension in children in response to increasing demands of complex sentences. A further goal is to study how individual differences in children's receptive language abilities are associated with such changes in cortical…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Usler, Evan; Smith, Anne; Weber, Christine
2017-01-01
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if indices of speech motor coordination during the production of sentences varying in sentence length and syntactic complexity were associated with stuttering persistence versus recovery in 5- to 7-year-old children. Methods: We compared children with persistent stuttering (CWS-Per) with children…
Spanish Word Order in Non-Sentence Constructions
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Stiehm, Bruce G.
1975-01-01
In Spanish non-sentence constructions, beginning elements establish a datum of reference, while following elements narrow the possibilities of syntagmatic combination. Word order is examined in relation to paradigm contrast and syntagmatic complexity. (CK)
Parametric effects of syntactic-semantic conflict in Broca's area during sentence processing.
Thothathiri, Malathi; Kim, Albert; Trueswell, John C; Thompson-Schill, Sharon L
2012-03-01
The hypothesized role of Broca's area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional neuroimaging revealed that activation within several Broca's area regions of interest reflected the parametric variation in syntactic-semantic conflict. These results suggest that Broca's area supports sentence processing by mediating between multiple incompatible constraints on sentence interpretation, consistent with this area's well-known role in conflict resolution in other linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning
Fedorenko, Evelina; Brunner, Peter; Pritchett, Brianna; Kanwisher, Nancy
2016-01-01
The neural processes that underlie your ability to read and understand this sentence are unknown. Sentence comprehension occurs very rapidly, and can only be understood at a mechanistic level by discovering the precise sequence of underlying computational and neural events. However, we have no continuous and online neural measure of sentence processing with high spatial and temporal resolution. Here we report just such a measure: intracranial recordings from the surface of the human brain show that neural activity, indexed by γ-power, increases monotonically over the course of a sentence as people read it. This steady increase in activity is absent when people read and remember nonword-lists, despite the higher cognitive demand entailed, ruling out accounts in terms of generic attention, working memory, and cognitive load. Response increases are lower for sentence structure without meaning (“Jabberwocky” sentences) and word meaning without sentence structure (word-lists), showing that this effect is not explained by responses to syntax or word meaning alone. Instead, the full effect is found only for sentences, implicating compositional processes of sentence understanding, a striking and unique feature of human language not shared with animal communication systems. This work opens up new avenues for investigating the sequence of neural events that underlie the construction of linguistic meaning. PMID:27671642
An interference account of the missing-VP effect
Häussler, Jana; Bader, Markus
2015-01-01
Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures. PMID:26136698
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Segaert, Katrien; Kempen, Gerard; Petersson, Karl Magnus; Hagoort, Peter
2013-01-01
Behavioral syntactic priming effects during sentence comprehension are typically observed only if both the syntactic structure and lexical head are repeated. In contrast, during production syntactic priming occurs with structure repetition alone, but the effect is boosted by repetition of the lexical head. We used fMRI to investigate the neuronal…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Ningling, Wei
2015-01-01
Prominence, as an important dimension of cognitive construal, refers to the capacity to evoke a certain substructure as the focus of attention, which can be materialized in a variety of semantic and grammatical expressions (Langacker, 1987). Subject of a sentence (Zhang, 2011) and specific sentence structures (Lin, 2013) can bring a substructure…
Syntactic priming in Chinese sentence comprehension: evidence from event-related potentials.
Chen, Qingrong; Xu, Xiaodong; Tan, Dingliang; Zhang, Jingjing; Zhong, Yuan
2013-10-01
Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study examined the nature of syntactic priming effects in Chinese. Participants were required to read prime-target sentence pairs each embedding an ambiguous relative clause (RC) containing either the same verb or a synonymous verb. In Chinese, the word de serves as a relative clause marker. During reading a potential Chinese RC structure (either the prime or the target sentence), Chinese readers initially expect to read an subject-verb-object (SVO) structure but the encounter of a relative clause marker de would make readers abandon the initial strategy and reanalyze the structure as a relative clause. A reduced P600 effect was elicited by the critical word de in the target sentence containing the same initial verb as in the prime sentence. No significant reduction of the P600 was observed in the target sentences in the synonymous condition. The results demonstrated that verb repetition but not similarity in meaning produced a syntactic priming effect in Chinese. The constraint-based lexicalist hypothesis and the argument structure theory were adopted to explain the syntactic priming effect obtained in the current study. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Cognitive Basis for Sentence Planning Difficulties in Discourse after Traumatic Brain Injury
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Peach, Richard K.
2013-01-01
Purpose: Analyses of language production of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) place increasing emphasis on microlinguistic (i.e., within-sentence) patterns. It is unknown whether the observed problems involve implementation of well-formed sentence frames or represent a fundamental linguistic disturbance in computing sentence structure.…
Warren, Tessa; Dickey, Michael Walsh; Liburd, Teljer L
2017-07-01
The rational inference, or noisy channel, account of language comprehension predicts that comprehenders are sensitive to the probabilities of different interpretations for a given sentence and adapt as these probabilities change (Gibson, Bergen & Piantadosi, 2013). This account provides an important new perspective on aphasic sentence comprehension: aphasia may increase the likelihood of sentence distortion, leading people with aphasia (PWA) to rely more on the prior probability of an interpretation and less on the form or structure of the sentence (Gibson, Sandberg, Fedorenko, Bergen & Kiran, 2015). We report the results of a sentence-picture matching experiment that tested the predictions of the rational inference account and other current models of aphasic sentence comprehension across a variety of sentence structures. Consistent with the rational inference account, PWA showed similar sensitivity to the probability of particular kinds of form distortions as age-matched controls, yet overall their interpretations relied more on prior probability and less on sentence form. As predicted by rational inference, but not by other models of sentence comprehension in aphasia, PWA's interpretations were more faithful to the form for active and passive sentences than for direct object and prepositional object sentences. However contra rational inference, there was no evidence that individual PWA's severity of syntactic or semantic impairment predicted their sensitivity to form versus the prior probability of a sentence, as cued by semantics. These findings confirm and extend previous findings that suggest the rational inference account holds promise for explaining aphasic and neurotypical comprehension, but they also raise new challenges for the account. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Yoon, Jungmee; Campanelli, Luca; Goral, Mira; Marton, Klara; Eichorn, Naomi; Obler, Loraine K.
2016-01-01
Background/Study Context Older adults show age-related decline in complex-sentence comprehension. This has been attributed to a decrease in cognitive abilities that may support language processing, such as working memory (e.g., Caplan, DeDe, Waters, & Michaud, 2011,Psychology and Aging, 26, 439–450). The authors examined whether older adults have difficulty comprehending semantically implausible sentences and whether specific executive functions contribute to their comprehension performance. Methods Forty-two younger adults (aged 18–35) and 42 older adults (aged 55–75) were tested on two experimental tasks: a multiple negative comprehension task and an information processing battery. Results Both groups, older and younger adults, showed poorer performance for implausible sentences than for plausible sentences; however, no interaction was found between plausibility and age group. A regression analysis revealed that inhibition efficiency, as measured by a task that required resistance to proactive interference, predicted comprehension of implausible sentences in older adults only. Consistent with the compensation hypothesis, the older adults with better inhibition skills showed better comprehension than those with poor inhibition skills. Conclusion The findings suggest that semantic implausibility, along with syntactic complexity, increases linguistic and cognitive processing loads on auditory sentence comprehension. Moreover, the contribution of inhibitory control to the processing of semantic plausibility, particularly among older adults, suggests that the relationship between cognitive ability and language comprehension is strongly influenced by age. PMID:25978447
Yoon, Jungmee; Campanelli, Luca; Goral, Mira; Marton, Klara; Eichorn, Naomi; Obler, Loraine K
2015-01-01
BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Older adults show age-related decline in complex-sentence comprehension. This has been attributed to a decrease in cognitive abilities that may support language processing, such as working memory (e.g., Caplan, DeDe, Waters, & Michaud, 2011,Psychology and Aging, 26, 439-450). The authors examined whether older adults have difficulty comprehending semantically implausible sentences and whether specific executive functions contribute to their comprehension performance. Forty-two younger adults (aged 18-35) and 42 older adults (aged 55-75) were tested on two experimental tasks: a multiple negative comprehension task and an information processing battery. Both groups, older and younger adults, showed poorer performance for implausible sentences than for plausible sentences; however, no interaction was found between plausibility and age group. A regression analysis revealed that inhibition efficiency, as measured by a task that required resistance to proactive interference, predicted comprehension of implausible sentences in older adults only. Consistent with the compensation hypothesis, the older adults with better inhibition skills showed better comprehension than those with poor inhibition skills. The findings suggest that semantic implausibility, along with syntactic complexity, increases linguistic and cognitive processing loads on auditory sentence comprehension. Moreover, the contribution of inhibitory control to the processing of semantic plausibility, particularly among older adults, suggests that the relationship between cognitive ability and language comprehension is strongly influenced by age.
Dependency Structures for Statistical Machine Translation
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bach, Nguyen
2012-01-01
Dependency structures represent a sentence as a set of dependency relations. Normally the dependency structures from a tree connect all the words in a sentence. One of the most defining characters of dependency structures is the ability to bring long distance dependency between words to local dependency structures. Another the main attraction of…
Why reread? Evidence from garden-path and local coherence structures.
Christianson, Kiel; Luke, Steven G; Hussey, Erika K; Wochna, Kacey L
2017-07-01
Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to compare the online reading and offline comprehension of main verb/reduced relative garden-path sentences and local coherence sentences. Rereading of early material in garden-path reduced relatives should be revisionary, aimed at reanalysing an earlier misparse; however, rereading of early material in a local coherence reduced relative need only be confirmatory, as the original parse of the earlier portion of these sentences is ultimately correct. Results of online and offline measures showed that local coherence structures elicited signals of reading disruption that arose earlier and lasted longer, and local coherence comprehension was also better than garden path comprehension. Few rereading measures in either sentence type were predicted by structural features of these sentences, nor was rereading related to comprehension accuracy, which was extremely low overall. Results are discussed with respect to selective reanalysis and good-enough processing.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Florit, Elena; Cain, Kate; Levorato, Maria Chiara
2017-01-01
This study examined Italian 7- to 9-year-olds' understanding of the connective "but" when used to relate two events in sentences embedded in short stories. Performance was largely accounted for by the cognitive complexity of the sentence that included the connective and the salience of its meaning (confirmed in a second study with…
Retrieval of Sentence Relations: Semantic vs. Syntactic Deep Structure.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Perfetti, Charles A.
Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context to college students are reported in this study. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and…
It is there whether you hear it or not: syntactic representation of missing arguments.
Cai, Zhenguang G; Pickering, Martin J; Wang, Ruiming; Branigan, Holly P
2015-03-01
Many languages allow arguments to be omitted when they are recoverable from the context, but how do people comprehend sentences with a missing argument? We contrast a syntactically-represented account whereby people postulate a syntactic representation for the missing argument, with a syntactically-non-represented account whereby people do not postulate any syntactic representation for it. We report two structural priming experiments in Mandarin Chinese that showed that comprehension of a dative sentence with a missing direct-object argument primed the production of a full-form dative sentence (relative to an intransitive) and that it behaved similarly to a corresponding full-form dative sentence. The results suggest that people construct the same constituent structure for missing-argument sentences and full-form sentences, in accord with the syntactically-represented account. We discuss the implications for syntactic representations in language processing. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Syntactic Prediction in Language Comprehension: Evidence From Either…or
Staub, Adrian; Clifton, Charles
2006-01-01
Readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly, across both sentence types. In addition, there was evidence that readers misanalyzed the S-coordination structure as an NP-coordination structure only when either was absent. The authors interpret the results as indicating that the word either enabled readers to predict the arrival of a coordination structure; this predictive activation facilitated processing of this structure when it ultimately arrived, and in the case of S-coordination sentences, enabled readers to avoid the incorrect NP-coordination analysis. The authors argue that these results support parsing theories according to which the parser can build predictable syntactic structure before encountering the corresponding lexical input. PMID:16569157
PASBio: predicate-argument structures for event extraction in molecular biology
Wattarujeekrit, Tuangthong; Shah, Parantu K; Collier, Nigel
2004-01-01
Background The exploitation of information extraction (IE), a technology aiming to provide instances of structured representations from free-form text, has been rapidly growing within the molecular biology (MB) research community to keep track of the latest results reported in literature. IE systems have traditionally used shallow syntactic patterns for matching facts in sentences but such approaches appear inadequate to achieve high accuracy in MB event extraction due to complex sentence structure. A consensus in the IE community is emerging on the necessity for exploiting deeper knowledge structures such as through the relations between a verb and its arguments shown by predicate-argument structure (PAS). PAS is of interest as structures typically correspond to events of interest and their participating entities. For this to be realized within IE a key knowledge component is the definition of PAS frames. PAS frames for non-technical domains such as newswire are already being constructed in several projects such as PropBank, VerbNet, and FrameNet. Knowledge from PAS should enable more accurate applications in several areas where sentence understanding is required like machine translation and text summarization. In this article, we explore the need to adapt PAS for the MB domain and specify PAS frames to support IE, as well as outlining the major issues that require consideration in their construction. Results We introduce PASBio by extending a model based on PropBank to the MB domain. The hypothesis we explore is that PAS holds the key for understanding relationships describing the roles of genes and gene products in mediating their biological functions. We chose predicates describing gene expression, molecular interactions and signal transduction events with the aim of covering a number of research areas in MB. Analysis was performed on sentences containing a set of verbal predicates from MEDLINE and full text journals. Results confirm the necessity to analyze PAS specifically for MB domain. Conclusions At present PASBio contains the analyzed PAS of over 30 verbs, publicly available on the Internet for use in advanced applications. In the future we aim to expand the knowledge base to cover more verbs and the nominal form of each predicate. PMID:15494078
Hackett, Paul M. W.
2016-01-01
When behavior is interpreted in a reliable manner (i.e., robustly across different situations and times) its explained meaning may be seen to possess hermeneutic consistency. In this essay I present an evaluation of the hermeneutic consistency that I propose may be present when the research tool known as the mapping sentence is used to create generic structural ontologies. I also claim that theoretical and empirical validity is a likely result of employing the mapping sentence in research design and interpretation. These claims are non-contentious within the realm of quantitative psychological and behavioral research. However, I extend the scope of both facet theory based research and claims for its structural utility, reliability and validity to philosophical and qualitative investigations. I assert that the hermeneutic consistency of a structural ontology is a product of a structural representation's ontological components and the mereological relationships between these ontological sub-units: the mapping sentence seminally allows for the depiction of such structure. PMID:27065932
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Caplan, David; Waters, Gloria; Bertram, Julia; Ostrowski, Adam; Michaud, Jennifer
2016-01-01
The authors assessed 4,865 middle and high school students for the ability to recognize and understand written and spoken morphologically simple words, morphologically complex words, and the syntactic structure of sentences and for the ability to answer questions about facts presented in a written passage and to make inferences based on those…
Xiao, Yaqiong; Friederici, Angela D; Margulies, Daniel S; Brauer, Jens
2016-03-01
The development of language comprehension abilities in childhood is closely related to the maturation of the brain, especially the ability to process syntactically complex sentences. Recent studies proposed that the fronto-temporal connection within left perisylvian regions, supporting the processing of syntactically complex sentences, is still immature at preschool age. In the current study, resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired from typically developing 5-year-old children and adults to shed further light on the brain functional development. Children additionally performed a behavioral syntactic comprehension test outside the scanner. The amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations was analyzed in order to identify the functional correlation networks of language-relevant brain regions. Results showed an intrahemispheric correlation between left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in adults, whereas an interhemispheric correlation between left IFG and its right-hemispheric homolog was predominant in children. Correlation analysis between resting-state functional connectivity and sentence processing performance in 5-year-olds revealed that local connectivity within the left IFG is associated with competence of processing syntactically simple canonical sentences, while long-range connectivity between IFG and pSTS in left hemisphere is associated with competence of processing syntactically relatively more complex non-canonical sentences. The present developmental data suggest that a selective left fronto-temporal connectivity network for processing complex syntax is already in functional connection at the age of 5 years when measured in a non-task situation. The correlational findings provide new insight into the relationship between intrinsic functional connectivity and syntactic language abilities in preschool children. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.
Sentence processing and verbal working memory in a white-matter-disconnection patient.
Meyer, Lars; Cunitz, Katrin; Obleser, Jonas; Friederici, Angela D
2014-08-01
The Arcuate Fasciculus/Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus (AF/SLF) is the white-matter bundle that connects posterior superior temporal and inferior frontal cortex. Its causal functional role in sentence processing and verbal working memory is currently under debate. While impairments of sentence processing and verbal working memory often co-occur in patients suffering from AF/SLF damage, it is unclear whether these impairments result from shared white-matter damage to the verbal-working-memory network. The present study sought to specify the behavioral consequences of focal AF/SLF damage for sentence processing and verbal working memory, which were assessed in a single patient suffering from a cleft-like lesion spanning the deep left superior temporal gyrus, sparing most surrounding gray matter. While tractography suggests that the ventral fronto-temporal white-matter bundle is intact in this patient, the AF/SLF was not visible to tractography. In line with the hypothesis that the AF/SLF is causally involved in sentence processing, the patient׳s performance was selectively impaired on sentences that jointly involve both complex word orders and long word-storage intervals. However, the patient was unimpaired on sentences that only involved long word-storage intervals without involving complex word orders. On the contrary, the patient performed generally worse than a control group across standard verbal-working-memory tests. We conclude that the AF/SLF not only plays a causal role in sentence processing, linking regions of the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus to the temporo-parietal region, but moreover plays a crucial role in verbal working memory, linking regions of the left ventral inferior frontal gyrus to the left temporo-parietal region. Together, the specific sentence-processing impairment and the more general verbal-working-memory impairment may imply that the AF/SLF subserves both sentence processing and verbal working memory, possibly pointing to the AF and SLF respectively supporting each. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Eye-Tracking and Corpus-Based Analyses of Syntax-Semantics Interactions in Complement Coercion
Lowder, Matthew W.; Gordon, Peter C.
2016-01-01
Previous work has shown that the difficulty associated with processing complex semantic expressions is reduced when the critical constituents appear in separate clauses as opposed to when they appear together in the same clause. We investigated this effect further, focusing in particular on complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb (e.g., began) combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., began the memo). Experiment 1 compared reading times for coercion versus control expressions when the critical verb and complement appeared together in a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) (e.g., The secretary that began/wrote the memo) compared to when they appeared together in a simple sentence. Readers spent more time processing coercion expressions than control expressions, replicating the typical coercion cost. In addition, readers spent less time processing the verb and complement in SRCs than in simple sentences; however, the magnitude of the coercion cost did not depend on sentence structure. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that the coercion cost was reduced when the complement appeared as the head of an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) (e.g., The memo that the secretary began/wrote) compared to when the constituents appeared together in an SRC. Consistent with the eye-tracking results of Experiment 2, a corpus analysis showed that expressions requiring complement coercion are more frequent when the constituents are separated by the clause boundary of an ORC compared to when they are embedded together within an SRC. The results provide important information about the types of structural configurations that contribute to reduced difficulty with complex semantic expressions, as well as how these processing patterns are reflected in naturally occurring language. PMID:28529960
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Brandt, Silke; Lieven, Elena; Tomasello, Michael
2016-01-01
Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., "the dog chased the cat"). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex sentences, such as transitive relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., "that's the dog that chased…
Working Memory and the Revision of Syntactic and Discourse Ambiguities
Evans, William S.; Caplan, David; Ostrowski, Adam; Michaud, Jennifer; Guarino, Anthony; Waters, Gloria
2015-01-01
Two hundred participants, 50 in each of four age ranges (19 – 29; 30 – 49, 50 – 69, 70 – 90) were tested for short term working memory, speed of processing and on-line processing of three types of sentences in which an initially assigned syntactic structure and/or semantic interpretation had to be revised. Self-paced reading times were longer for the segments which signaled the need for revision, and there were interactions of age and sentence type and of speed of processing and sentence type, but not of working memory and sentence type, on reading times for these segments. The results provide evidence that working memory does not support the processes that revise the structure and interpretation of sentences and discourse. PMID:25485458
Focus Structure in Persian Interrogative Sentences: An RRG Analysis
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Rezai, Vali; Hooshmand, Mozhgan
2012-01-01
The studies regarding information structure and its distribution in sentences are traced back to works of Prague School linguists such as Mathesius in 1920s. Recently, the issue of information structure has been dealt with by functionalists. In Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), information structure constitutes one of the main components of…
Unraveling Difficult Sentences: Strategies to Support Reading Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Zipoli, Richard P., Jr.
2017-01-01
The ability to understand sentences contributes to students' reading comprehension. However, many reading programs tend to underemphasize explicit instruction aimed at enhancing students' knowledge of sentence structures. Children with language impairments, students with learning disabilities, and English language learners may particularly benefit…
Deaf Readers’ Response to Syntactic Complexity: Evidence from Self-Paced Reading
Traxler, Matthew J.; Corina, David P.; Morford, Jill P.; Hafer, Sarah; Hoversten, Liv J.
2013-01-01
This study was designed to determine the feasibility of using self-paced reading methods to study deaf readers and to assess how deaf readers respond to two syntactic manipulations. Three groups of participants read the test sentences: deaf readers, hearing monolingual English readers, and hearing bilingual readers whose second language was English. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing subject relative or object relative clauses. The test sentences contained semantic information that influences on-line processing outcomes (Traxler et al., 2002; 2005). All of the participant groups had greater difficulty processing sentences containing object relative clauses. This difficulty was reduced when helpful semantic cues were present. In Experiment 2, participants read active voice and passive voice sentences. The sentences were processed similarly by all three groups. Comprehension accuracy was higher in hearing readers than in deaf readers. Within deaf readers, native signers read the sentences faster and comprehended them to a higher degree than did non-native signers. These results indicate that self-paced reading is a useful method for studying sentence interpretation among deaf readers. PMID:23868696
Sentence comprehension in agrammatic aphasia: history and variability to clinical implications.
Johnson, Danielle; Cannizzaro, Michael S
2009-01-01
Individuals with Broca's aphasia often present with deficits in their ability to comprehend non-canonical sentences. This has been contrastingly characterized as a systematic loss of specific grammatical abilities or as individual variability in the dynamics between processing load and resource availability. The present study investigated sentence level comprehension in participants with Broca's aphasia in an attempt to integrate these contrasting views into a clinically useful process. Two participants diagnosed with Broca's aphasia were assessed using a sentence-to-picture matching paradigm and a truth-value judgement task, across sentence constructions thought to be problematic for this population. The data demonstrate markedly different patterns of performance between participants, as well as variability within participants (e.g. by sentence type). These findings support the notion of individual performance variability in persons with aphasia. Syntactic theory was instructive for assessing sentence level comprehension, leading to a clinically relevant process of identifying treatment targets considering both performance variability and syntactic complexity for this population.
Memory for syntax despite amnesia.
Ferreira, Victor S; Bock, Kathryn; Wilson, Michael P; Cohen, Neal J
2008-09-01
Syntactic persistence is a tendency for speakers to reproduce sentence structures independently of accompanying meanings, words, or sounds. The memory mechanisms behind syntactic persistence are not fully understood. Although some properties of syntactic persistence suggest a role for procedural memory, current evidence suggests that procedural memory (unlike declarative memory) does not maintain the abstract, relational features that are inherent to syntactic structures. In a study evaluating the contribution of procedural memory to syntactic persistence, patients with anterograde amnesia and matched control speakers reproduced prime sentences with different syntactic structures; reproduced 0, 1, 6, or 10 neutral sentences; then spontaneously described pictures that elicited the primed structures; and finally made recognition judgments for the prime sentences. Amnesic and control speakers showed significant and equivalent syntactic persistence, despite the amnesic speakers' profoundly impaired recognition memory for the primes. Thus, syntax is maintained by procedural-memory mechanisms. This result reveals that procedural memory is capable of supporting abstract, relational knowledge.
Structural syntactic prediction measured with ELAN: evidence from ERPs.
Fonteneau, Elisabeth
2013-02-08
The current study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how and when argument structure information is used during the processing of sentences with a filler-gap dependency. We hypothesize that one specific property - animacy (living vs. non-living) - is used by the parser during the building of the syntactic structure. Participants heard sentences that were rated off-line as having an expected noun (Who did the Lion King chase the caravan with?) or an unexpected noun (Who did Lion King chase the animal with?). This prediction is based on the animacy properties relation between the wh-word and the noun in the object position. ERPs from the noun in the unexpected condition (animal) elicited a typical Early Left Anterior Negativity (ELAN)/P600 complex compared to the noun in the expected condition (caravan). Firstly, these results demonstrate that the ELAN reflects not only grammatical category violation but also animacy property expectations in filler-gap dependency. Secondly, our data suggests that the language comprehension system is able to make detailed predictions about aspects of the upcoming words to build up the syntactic structure. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
Determinants of structural choice in visually situated sentence production.
Myachykov, Andriy; Garrod, Simon; Scheepers, Christoph
2012-11-01
Three experiments investigated how perceptual, structural, and lexical cues affect structural choices during English transitive sentence production. Participants described transitive events under combinations of visual cueing of attention (toward either agent or patient) and structural priming with and without semantic match between the notional verb in the prime and the target event. Speakers had a stronger preference for passive-voice sentences (1) when their attention was directed to the patient, (2) upon reading a passive-voice prime, and (3) when the verb in the prime matched the target event. The verb-match effect was the by-product of an interaction between visual cueing and verb match: the increase in the proportion of passive-voice responses with matching verbs was limited to the agent-cued condition. Persistence of visual cueing effects in the presence of both structural and lexical cues suggests a strong coupling between referent-directed visual attention and Subject assignment in a spoken sentence. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Violations of information structure: an electrophysiological study of answers to wh-questions.
Cowles, H W; Kluender, Robert; Kutas, Marta; Polinsky, Maria
2007-09-01
This study investigates brain responses to violations of information structure in wh-question-answer pairs, with particular emphasis on violations of focus assignment in it-clefts (It was the queen that silenced the banker). Two types of ERP responses in answers to wh-questions were found. First, all words in the focus-marking (cleft) position elicited a large positivity (P3b) characteristic of sentence-final constituents, as did the final words of these sentences, which suggests that focused elements may trigger integration effects like those seen at sentence end. Second, the focusing of an inappropriate referent elicited a smaller, N400-like effect. The results show that comprehenders actively use structural focus cues and discourse-level restrictions during online sentence processing. These results, based on visual stimuli, were different from the brain response to auditory focus violations indicated by pitch-accent [Hruska, C., Steinhauer, K., Alter, K., & Steube, A. (2000). ERP effects of sentence accents and violations of the information structure. In Poster presented at the 13th annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing, San Diego, CA.], but similar to brain responses to newly introduced discourse referents [Bornkessel, I., Schlesewsky, M., & Friederici, A. (2003). Contextual information modulated initial processes of syntactic integration: the role of inter- versus intrasentential predictions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 871-882.].
Caplan, David; Michaud, Jennifer; Hufford, Rebecca
2015-01-01
Sixty-one people with aphasia (pwa) and 41 matched controls were tested for the ability to understand sentences that required the ability to process particular syntactic elements and assign particular syntactic structures. Participants paced themselves word-by-word through 20 examples of 11 spoken sentence types and indicated which of two pictures corresponded to the meaning of each sentence. Sentences were developed in pairs such that comprehension of the experimental version of a pair required an aspect of syntactic processing not required in the corresponding baseline sentence. The need for the syntactic operations required only in the experimental version was triggered at a "critical word" in the experimental sentence. Listening times for critical words in experimental sentences were compared to those for corresponding words in the corresponding baseline sentences. The results were consistent with several models of syntactic comprehension deficits in pwa: resource reduction, slowed lexical and/or syntactic processing, abnormal susceptibility to interference from thematic roles generated non-syntactically. They suggest that a previously unidentified disturbance limiting the duration of parsing and interpretation may lead to these deficits, and that this mechanism may lead to structure-specific deficits in pwa. The results thus point to more than one mechanism underlying syntactic comprehension disorders both across and within pwa.
Second-language instinct and instruction effects: nature and nurture in second-language acquisition.
Yusa, Noriaki; Koizumi, Masatoshi; Kim, Jungho; Kimura, Naoki; Uchida, Shinya; Yokoyama, Satoru; Miura, Naoki; Kawashima, Ryuta; Hagiwara, Hiroko
2011-10-01
Adults seem to have greater difficulties than children in acquiring a second language (L2) because of the alleged "window of opportunity" around puberty. Postpuberty Japanese participants learned a new English rule with simplex sentences during one month of instruction, and then they were tested on "uninstructed complex sentences" as well as "instructed simplex sentences." The behavioral data show that they can acquire more knowledge than is instructed, suggesting the interweaving of nature (universal principles of grammar, UG) and nurture (instruction) in L2 acquisition. The comparison in the "uninstructed complex sentences" between post-instruction and pre-instruction using functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals a significant activation in Broca's area. Thus, this study provides new insight into Broca's area, where nature and nurture cooperate to produce L2 learners' rich linguistic knowledge. It also shows neural plasticity of adult L2 acquisition, arguing against a critical period hypothesis, at least in the domain of UG.
Özçalışkan, Şeyda; Levine, Susan C.; Goldin-Meadow, Susan
2013-01-01
Children with pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL) show remarkable plasticity for language development. Is this plasticity characterized by the same developmental trajectory that characterizes typically developing (TD) children, with gesture leading the way into speech? We explored this question, comparing 11 children with PL—matched to 30 TD children on expressive vocabulary—in the second year of life. Children with PL showed similarities to TD children for simple but not complex sentence types. Children with PL produced simple sentences across gesture and speech several months before producing them entirely in speech, exhibiting parallel delays in both gesture+speech and speech-alone. However, unlike TD children, children with PL produced complex sentence types first in speech-alone. Overall, the gesture-speech system appears to be a robust feature of language-learning for simple—but not complex—sentence constructions, acting as a harbinger of change in language development even when that language is developing in an injured brain. PMID:23217292
Sentence Combining: A Sequence for Instruction.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lawlor, Joseph
1983-01-01
Classifies various syntactic structures normally included in sentence-combining instruction into five categories: coordinates, adverbials, restrictive noun modifiers, noun substitutes, and free modifiers. Within each category, structures are further divided into three levels to provide teachers with guidelines for planning instruction. (RH)
Design of short Italian sentences to assess near vision performance.
Calossi, Antonio; Boccardo, Laura; Fossetti, Alessandro; Radner, Wolfgang
2014-01-01
To develop and validate 28 short Italian sentences for the construction of the Italian version of the Radner Reading Chart to simultaneously measure near visual acuity and reading speed. 41 sentences were constructed in Italian language, following the procedure defined by Radner, to obtain "sentence optotypes" with comparable structure and with the same lexical and grammatical difficulty. Sentences were statistically selected and used in 211 normal, non-presbyopic, native Italian-speaking persons. The most equally matched sentences in terms of reading speed and number of reading errors were selected. To assess the validity of the reading speed results obtained with the 28 selected short sentences, we compared the reading speed and reading errors with the average obtained by reading two long 4th-grade paragraphs (97 and 90 words) under the same conditions. The overall mean reading speed of the tested persons was 189±26wpm. The 28 sentences more similar in terms of reading times were selected, achieving a coefficient of variation (the relative SD) of 2.2%. The reliability analyses yielded an overall Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.98. The correlation between the short sentences and the long paragraph was high (r=0.85, P<0.0001). The 28 short single Italian sentences optotypes were highly comparable in syntactical structure, number, position, and length of words, lexical difficulty, and reading length. The resulting Italian Radner Reading Chart is precise (high consistency) and practical (short sentences) and therefore useful for research and clinical practice to simultaneously measure near reading acuity and reading speed. Copyright © 2013 Spanish General Council of Optometry. Published by Elsevier Espana. All rights reserved.
The Timing of Verb Selection in Japanese Sentence Production
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Momma, Shota; Slevc, L. Robert; Phillips, Colin
2016-01-01
Many influential models of sentence production (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994; Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987; Levelt, 1989) emphasize the central role of verbs in structural encoding, and thus predict that verbs should be selected early in sentence formulation, possibly even before the phonological encoding of the first constituent (Ferreira, 2000).…
Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Written Sentence Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Caplan, David
2004-01-01
Sentences convey relationships between the meanings of words, such as who is accomplishing an action or receiving it. Functional neuroimaging based on positron-emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging has been used to identify areas of the brain involved in structuring sentences and determining aspects of meaning associated…
Counting the Nouns: Simple Structural Cues to Verb Meaning
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Yuan, Sylvia; Fisher, Cynthia; Snedeker, Jesse
2012-01-01
Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in--"subcategorization frames"--to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping between nouns in sentences and participant…
Chang, Franklin; Rowland, Caroline; Ferguson, Heather; Pine, Julian
2017-01-01
We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active from passive sentences, after processing the remainder of the sentence frame. For this second question we used eye-tracking (Study 1) and forced-choice pointing (Study 2). For both studies, we used a paradigm in which participants simultaneously saw two novel actions with reversed agent-patient relations while listening to active and passive sentences. We compared English-speaking 25-month-olds and 41-month-olds in between-subjects sentence structure conditions (Active Transitive Condition vs. Passive Condition). A permutation analysis found that both age groups showed a bias to incrementally map the first noun in a sentence onto an agent role. Regarding the second question, 25-month-olds showed some evidence of distinguishing the two structures in the eye-tracking study. However, the 25-month-olds did not distinguish active from passive sentences in the forced choice pointing task. In contrast, the 41-month-old children did reanalyse their initial first-NP-as-agent bias to the extent that they clearly distinguished between active and passive sentences both in the eye-tracking data and in the pointing task. The results are discussed in relation to the development of syntactic (re)parsing. PMID:29049390
Elaboration over a Discourse Facilitates Retrieval in Sentence Processing.
Troyer, Melissa; Hofmeister, Philip; Kutas, Marta
2016-01-01
Language comprehension requires access to stored knowledge and the ability to combine knowledge in new, meaningful ways. Previous work has shown that processing linguistically more complex expressions ('Texas cattle rancher' vs. 'rancher') leads to slow-downs in reading during initial processing, possibly reflecting effort in combining information. Conversely, when this information must subsequently be retrieved (as in filler-gap constructions), processing is facilitated for more complex expressions, possibly because more semantic cues are available during retrieval. To follow up on this hypothesis, we tested whether information distributed across a short discourse can similarly provide effective cues for retrieval. Participants read texts introducing two referents (e.g., two senators), one of whom was described in greater detail than the other (e.g., 'The Democrat had voted for one of the senators, and the Republican had voted for the other, a man from Ohio who was running for president'). The final sentence (e.g., 'The senator who the {Republican/Democrat}had voted for…') contained a relative clause picking out either the Many-Cue referent (with 'Republican') or the One-Cue referent (with 'Democrat'). We predicted facilitated retrieval (faster reading times) for the Many-Cue condition at the verb region ('had voted for'), where readers could understand that 'The senator' is the object of the verb. As predicted, this pattern was observed at the retrieval region and continued throughout the rest of the sentence. Participants also completed the Author/Magazine Recognition Tests (ART/MRT; Stanovich and West, 1989), providing a proxy for world knowledge. Since higher ART/MRT scores may index (a) greater experience accessing relevant knowledge and/or (b) richer/more highly structured representations in semantic memory, we predicted it would be positively associated with effects of elaboration on retrieval. We did not observe the predicted interaction between ART/MRT scores and Cue condition at the retrieval region, though ART/MRT interacted with Cue condition in other locations in the sentence. In sum, we found that providing more elaborative information over the course of a text can facilitate retrieval for referents, consistent with a framework in which referential elaboration over a discourse and not just local linguistic information directly impacts information retrieval during sentence processing.
Persistence of Initial Misanalysis with No Referential Ambiguity
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Nakamura, Chie; Arai, Manabu
2016-01-01
Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make…
Treatment of sentence comprehension and production in aphasia: is there cross-modal generalisation?
Adelt, Anne; Hanne, Sandra; Stadie, Nicole
2016-09-09
Exploring generalisation following treatment of language deficits in aphasia can provide insights into the functional relation of the cognitive processing systems involved. In the present study, we first review treatment outcomes of interventions targeting sentence processing deficits and, second report a treatment study examining the occurrence of practice effects and generalisation in sentence comprehension and production. In order to explore the potential linkage between processing systems involved in comprehending and producing sentences, we investigated whether improvements generalise within (i.e., uni-modal generalisation in comprehension or in production) and/or across modalities (i.e., cross-modal generalisation from comprehension to production or vice versa). Two individuals with aphasia displaying co-occurring deficits in sentence comprehension and production were trained on complex, non-canonical sentences in both modalities. Two evidence-based treatment protocols were applied in a crossover intervention study with sequence of treatment phases being randomly allocated. Both participants benefited significantly from treatment, leading to uni-modal generalisation in both comprehension and production. However, cross-modal generalisation did not occur. The magnitude of uni-modal generalisation in sentence production was related to participants' sentence comprehension performance prior to treatment. These findings support the assumption of modality-specific sub-systems for sentence comprehension and production, being linked uni-directionally from comprehension to production.
Neural correlates of processing sentences and compound words in Chinese
Hung, Yi-Hui; Tzeng, Ovid; Wu, Denise H.
2017-01-01
Sentence reading involves multiple linguistic operations including processing of lexical and compositional semantics, and determining structural and grammatical relationships among words. Previous studies on Indo-European languages have associated left anterior temporal lobe (aTL) and left interior frontal gyrus (IFG) with reading sentences compared to reading unstructured word lists. To examine whether these brain regions are also involved in reading a typologically distinct language with limited morphosyntax and lack of agreement between sentential arguments, an FMRI study was conducted to compare passive reading of Chinese sentences, unstructured word lists and disconnected character lists that are created by only changing the order of an identical set of characters. Similar to previous findings from other languages, stronger activation was found in mainly left-lateralized anterior temporal regions (including aTL) for reading sentences compared to unstructured word and character lists. On the other hand, stronger activation was identified in left posterior temporal sulcus for reading unstructured words compared to unstructured characters. Furthermore, reading unstructured word lists compared to sentences evoked stronger activation in left IFG and left inferior parietal lobule. Consistent with the literature on Indo-European languages, the present results suggest that left anterior temporal regions subserve sentence-level integration, while left IFG supports restoration of sentence structure. In addition, left posterior temporal sulcus is associated with morphological compounding. Taken together, reading Chinese sentences engages a common network as reading other languages, with particular reliance on integration of semantic constituents. PMID:29194453
Al Aqeel, Sinaa; Abanmy, Norah; Aldayel, Abeer; Al-Khalifa, Hend; Al-Yahya, Maha; Diab, Mona
2018-02-27
Written Medicine Information (WMI) is one of the sources that patients use to obtain information concerning medicine. This paper aims to assess the readability of two types of WMIs in Arabic language based on vocabulary use and sentence structure using a panel of experts and consumers. This is a descriptive study. Two different types of materials, including the online text from King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Arabic Health Encyclopaedia (KAAHE) and medication leaflets submitted by the manufacturers to the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) were evaluated. We selected a group of sentences from each WMI. The readability was assessed by experts (n = 5) and consumers (n = 5). The sentence readability of each measured using a specific criteria and rated as 1 = easy, 2 = intermediate, or 3 = difficult. A total of 4476 sentences (SFDA 2231; KAHEE 2245) extracted from websites or patient information leaflets on 50 medications and evaluated. The majority of the vocabulary and sentence structure was considered easy by both expert (SFDA: 68%; KAAHE: 76%) and consumer (SFDA: 76%; KAAHE: 84%) groups. The sentences with difficult or intermediate vocabulary and sentence structure are derived primarily from the precautions and side effects sections. The SFDA and KAAHE WMIs are easy to read and understand as judged by our study sample. However; there is room for improvement, especially in sections related to the side effects and precautions.
Are crossing dependencies really scarce?
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Ferrer-i-Cancho, R.; Gómez-Rodríguez, C.; Esteban, J. L.
2018-03-01
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be modelled as a tree, where vertices correspond to words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies. It has been claimed recurrently that the number of edge crossings in real sentences is small. However, a baseline or null hypothesis has been lacking. Here we quantify the amount of crossings of real sentences and compare it to the predictions of a series of baselines. We conclude that crossings are really scarce in real sentences. Their scarcity is unexpected by the hubiness of the trees. Indeed, real sentences are close to linear trees, where the potential number of crossings is maximized.
Bootstrapping language acquisition.
Abend, Omri; Kwiatkowski, Tom; Smith, Nathaniel J; Goldwater, Sharon; Steedman, Mark
2017-07-01
The semantic bootstrapping hypothesis proposes that children acquire their native language through exposure to sentences of the language paired with structured representations of their meaning, whose component substructures can be associated with words and syntactic structures used to express these concepts. The child's task is then to learn a language-specific grammar and lexicon based on (probably contextually ambiguous, possibly somewhat noisy) pairs of sentences and their meaning representations (logical forms). Starting from these assumptions, we develop a Bayesian probabilistic account of semantically bootstrapped first-language acquisition in the child, based on techniques from computational parsing and interpretation of unrestricted text. Our learner jointly models (a) word learning: the mapping between components of the given sentential meaning and lexical words (or phrases) of the language, and (b) syntax learning: the projection of lexical elements onto sentences by universal construction-free syntactic rules. Using an incremental learning algorithm, we apply the model to a dataset of real syntactically complex child-directed utterances and (pseudo) logical forms, the latter including contextually plausible but irrelevant distractors. Taking the Eve section of the CHILDES corpus as input, the model simulates several well-documented phenomena from the developmental literature. In particular, the model exhibits syntactic bootstrapping effects (in which previously learned constructions facilitate the learning of novel words), sudden jumps in learning without explicit parameter setting, acceleration of word-learning (the "vocabulary spurt"), an initial bias favoring the learning of nouns over verbs, and one-shot learning of words and their meanings. The learner thus demonstrates how statistical learning over structured representations can provide a unified account for these seemingly disparate phenomena. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Negation, questions, and structure building in a homesign system
Franklin, Amy; Giannakidou, Anastasia; Goldin-Meadow, Susan
2013-01-01
Deaf children whose hearing losses are so severe that they cannot acquire spoken language, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language, use gestures called homesigns to communicate. Homesigns have been shown to contain many of the properties of natural languages. Here we ask whether homesign has structure building devices for negation and questions. We identify two meanings (negation, question) that correspond semantically to propositional functions, that is, to functions that apply to a sentence (whose semantic value is a proposition, φ) and yield another proposition that is more complex (¬φ for negation; ?φ for question). Combining φ with¬ or ? thus involves sentence modification. We propose that these negative and question functions are structure building operators, and we support this claim with data from an American homesigner. We show that: (a) each meaning is marked by a particular form in the child’s gesture system (side-to-side headshake for negation, manual flip for question); (b) the two markers occupy systematic, and different, positions at the periphery of the gesture sentences (headshake at the beginning, flip at the end); and (c) the flip is extended from questions to other uses associated with the wh-form (exclamatives, referential expressions of location) and thus functions like a category in natural languages. If what we see in homesign is a language creation process (Goldin-Meadow, 2003), and if negation and question formation involve sentential modification, then our analysis implies that homesign has at least this minimal sentential syntax. Our findings thus contribute to ongoing debates about properties that are fundamental to language and language learning. PMID:23630971
Neural Correlates of Metonymy Resolution
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Rapp, Alexander M.; Erb, Michael; Grodd, Wolfgang; Bartels, Mathias; Markert, Katja
2011-01-01
Metonymies are exemplary models for complex semantic association processes at the sentence level. We investigated processing of metonymies using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During an 1.5 Tesla fMRI scan, 14 healthy subjects (12 female) read 124 short German sentences with either literal (like "Africa is arid"),…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Chang, Xin; Wang, Pei
2016-01-01
To investigate the influence of L2 proficiency and syntactic similarity on English passive sentence processing, the present ERP study asked 40 late Chinese-English bilinguals (27 females and 13 males, mean age = 23.88) with high or intermediate L2 proficiency to read the sentences carefully and to indicate for each sentence whether or not it was…
An Activation-Based Model of Sentence Processing as Skilled Memory Retrieval
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lewis, Richard L.; Vasishth, Shravan
2005-01-01
We present a detailed process theory of the moment-by-moment working-memory retrievals and associated control structure that subserve sentence comprehension. The theory is derived from the application of independently motivated principles of memory and cognitive skill to the specialized task of sentence parsing. The resulting theory construes…
The Reed & Kellogg System of Sentence Diagramming and Its Implementation in Higher Education
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Coats, Judith Ruth
2012-01-01
The purpose of this study was to research whether or not the intervention of the Reed & Kellogg System of sentence diagramming would make a significant difference in the acquisition, retention, and comprehension of the basic grammatical skills, including parts of speech, complements, phrases, clauses, and sentence structures, on the higher…
Courtroom Workgroups and Sentencing: The Effects of Similarity, Proximity, and Stability
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Haynes, Stacy Hoskins; Ruback, Barry; Cusick, Gretchen Ruth
2010-01-01
Sentencing decisions are the product of a group of courtroom actors, primarily judges and district attorneys. Although the structure of the courtroom workgroup and the interdependencies among members are assumed to be important determinants of sentencing decisions, the degree of this importance and the specific mechanisms through which workgroups…
The Role of Broca's Area in Sentence Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Rogalsky, Corianne; Hickok, Gregory
2011-01-01
The role of Broca's area in sentence processing has been debated for the last 30 years. A central and still unresolved issue is whether Broca's area plays a specific role in some aspect of syntactic processing (e.g., syntactic movement, hierarchical structure building) or whether it serves a more general function on which sentence processing…
Five Strategies for Remediating Sentence-Level Writing Deficiencies
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Quible, Zane K.
2006-01-01
Two types of sentence-level writing problems are often observed in student writing: (1) those that violate conventions of standard written English, such as subject-verb agreement errors and comma splices; and (2) those that involve a stylistic choice, such as beginning a sentence with an expletive structure like "There are" or using "if" rather…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Naigles, Letitia R.; Lehrer, Nadine
2002-01-01
This research investigates language-general and language-specific properties of the acquisition of argument structure. Ten French preschoolers enacted forty sentences containing motion verbs; sixteen sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was incompatible with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g. *"Le tigre va le…
Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction
Arnhold, Anja; Chen, Aoju; Järvikivi, Juhani
2016-01-01
Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Finnish on the one hand and to children acquiring other languages on the other hand. Analyzing a total of 571 sentences produced by 16 children, we found that children rarely adjusted input word order, but did systematically avoid marked OVS order in contrastive object focus condition. Focus condition also significantly affected four prosodic parameters, f0, duration, pauses and voice quality. Differing slightly from effects displayed in adult Finnish speech, the children produced larger f0 ranges for words in contrastive focus and smaller ones for unfocused words, varied only the duration of object constituents to be longer in focus and shorter in unfocused condition, inserted more pauses before and after focused constituents and systematically modified their use of non-modal voice quality only in utterances with narrow focus. Crucially, these effects were modulated by word order. In contrast to comparable data from children acquiring Germanic languages, the present findings reflect the more central role of word order and of interactions between word order and prosody in marking information structure in Finnish. Thus, the study highlights the role of the target language in determining linguistic development. PMID:27990130
Music and Language Syntax Interact in Broca's Area: An fMRI Study.
Kunert, Richard; Willems, Roel M; Casasanto, Daniel; Patel, Aniruddh D; Hagoort, Peter
2015-01-01
Instrumental music and language are both syntactic systems, employing complex, hierarchically-structured sequences built using implicit structural norms. This organization allows listeners to understand the role of individual words or tones in the context of an unfolding sentence or melody. Previous studies suggest that the brain mechanisms of syntactic processing may be partly shared between music and language. However, functional neuroimaging evidence for anatomical overlap of brain activity involved in linguistic and musical syntactic processing has been lacking. In the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with an interference paradigm based on sung sentences. We show that the processing demands of musical syntax (harmony) and language syntax interact in Broca's area in the left inferior frontal gyrus (without leading to music and language main effects). A language main effect in Broca's area only emerged in the complex music harmony condition, suggesting that (with our stimuli and tasks) a language effect only becomes visible under conditions of increased demands on shared neural resources. In contrast to previous studies, our design allows us to rule out that the observed neural interaction is due to: (1) general attention mechanisms, as a psychoacoustic auditory anomaly behaved unlike the harmonic manipulation, (2) error processing, as the language and the music stimuli contained no structural errors. The current results thus suggest that two different cognitive domains-music and language-might draw on the same high level syntactic integration resources in Broca's area.
Music and Language Syntax Interact in Broca’s Area: An fMRI Study
Kunert, Richard; Willems, Roel M.; Casasanto, Daniel; Patel, Aniruddh D.; Hagoort, Peter
2015-01-01
Instrumental music and language are both syntactic systems, employing complex, hierarchically-structured sequences built using implicit structural norms. This organization allows listeners to understand the role of individual words or tones in the context of an unfolding sentence or melody. Previous studies suggest that the brain mechanisms of syntactic processing may be partly shared between music and language. However, functional neuroimaging evidence for anatomical overlap of brain activity involved in linguistic and musical syntactic processing has been lacking. In the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with an interference paradigm based on sung sentences. We show that the processing demands of musical syntax (harmony) and language syntax interact in Broca’s area in the left inferior frontal gyrus (without leading to music and language main effects). A language main effect in Broca’s area only emerged in the complex music harmony condition, suggesting that (with our stimuli and tasks) a language effect only becomes visible under conditions of increased demands on shared neural resources. In contrast to previous studies, our design allows us to rule out that the observed neural interaction is due to: (1) general attention mechanisms, as a psychoacoustic auditory anomaly behaved unlike the harmonic manipulation, (2) error processing, as the language and the music stimuli contained no structural errors. The current results thus suggest that two different cognitive domains—music and language—might draw on the same high level syntactic integration resources in Broca’s area. PMID:26536026
Kelly, Ronald R; Berent, Gerald P
2011-01-01
This research contrasted deaf and hearing students' interpretive knowledge of English sentences containing numeral quantifier phrases and indefinite noun phrases. A multiple-interpretation picture task methodology was used to assess 305 participants' judgments of the compatibility of sentence meanings with depicted discourse contexts. Participants' performance was assessed on the basis of hearing level (deaf, hearing) and grade level (middle school, high school, college). The deaf students were predicted to have differential access to specific sentence interpretations in accordance with the relative derivational complexity of the targeted sentence types. Hypotheses based on the pressures of derivational economy on acquisition were largely supported. The results also revealed that the deaf participants tended to overactivate pragmatic processes that yielded principled, though non-target, sentence interpretations. Collectively, the results not only contribute to the understanding of English acquisition under conditions of restricted access to spoken language input, they also suggest that pragmatic factors may play a broad role in influencing, and compromising, deaf students' reading comprehension and written expression.
Syntactic Computation in the Human Brain: The Degree of Merger as a Key Factor
Ohta, Shinri; Fukui, Naoki; Sakai, Kuniyoshi L.
2013-01-01
Our goal of this study is to characterize the functions of language areas in most precise terms. Previous neuroimaging studies have reported that more complex sentences elicit larger activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus (L. F3op/F3t), although the most critical factor still remains to be identified. We hypothesize that pseudowords with grammatical particles and morphosyntactic information alone impose a construction of syntactic structures, just like normal sentences, and that “the Degree of Merger” (DoM) in recursively merged sentences parametrically modulates neural activations. Using jabberwocky sentences with distinct constructions, we fitted various parametric models of syntactic, other linguistic, and nonlinguistic factors to activations measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. We demonstrated that the models of DoM and “DoM+number of Search (searching syntactic features)” were the best to explain activations in the L. F3op/F3t and supramarginal gyrus (L. SMG), respectively. We further introduced letter strings, which had neither lexical associations nor grammatical particles, but retained both matching orders and symbol orders of sentences. By directly contrasting jabberwocky sentences with letter strings, localized activations in L. F3op/F3t and L. SMG were indeed independent of matching orders and symbol orders. Moreover, by using dynamic causal modeling, we found that the model with a inhibitory modulatory effect for the bottom-up connectivity from L. SMG to L. F3op/F3t was the best one. For this best model, the top-down connection from L. F3op/F3t to L. SMG was significantly positive. By using diffusion-tensor imaging, we confirmed that the left dorsal pathway of the superior longitudinal and arcuate fasciculi consistently connected these regions. Lastly, we established that nonlinguistic order-related and error-related factors significantly activated the right (R.) lateral premotor cortex and R. F3op/F3t, respectively. These results indicate that the identified network of L. F3op/F3t and L. SMG subserves the calculation of DoM in recursively merged sentences. PMID:23437097
The Influence of Verb-Bound Syntactic Preferences on the Processing of Syntactic Structures
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Segaert, Katrien; Weber, Kirsten; Cladder-Micus, Mira; Hagoort, Peter
2014-01-01
Speakers sometimes repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. We investigated the influence of verb-bound syntactic preferences on syntactic priming effects in response choices and response latencies for German ditransitive sentences. In the response choices we found "inverse preference effects":…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
MELLON, JOHN C.
THIS STUDY REPORTS AN EXPERIMENT ON THE HYPOTHESIS THAT GRAMMAR-RELATED SENTENCE-COMBINING PRACTICE WILL MEANINGFULLY ENHANCE THE NORMAL GROWTH OF SYNTACTIC FLUENCY. TRADITIONAL STUDIES ON ERROR THERAPY AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE ARE REVIEWED, AND DESIGN AND RATIONALE ARE INFERRED FROM THE RESEARCH OF BATEMAN AND ZIDONIS. RULE LEARNING, PATTERN…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Balajthy, Ernest P., Jr.
Sixty tenth graders participated in this study of relationships between eye/voice span, phrase and clause boundaries, reading ability, and sentence structure. Results indicated that sentences apparently are "chunked" into surface constituents during processing. Better tenth grade readers had longer eye/voice spans than did poorer readers and…
Sentence and Discourse Processes in Skilled Comprehension. Resource Publication Series 4 No. 3.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Townsend, David J.
This research disproves the hypothesis that less-skilled comprehenders are less able to take advantage of constraints at all levels of structure. Five studies used self-paced reading, meaning probe judgment, recall, and sentence and word recognition tasks to examine the effect of supportive discourse contexts on sentence processing in skilled and…
Complex Sentence Comprehension and Working Memory in Children with Specific Language Impairment
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Montgomery, James W.; Evans, Julia L.
2009-01-01
Purpose: This study investigated the association of 2 mechanisms of working memory (phonological short-term memory [PSTM], attentional resource capacity/allocation) with the sentence comprehension of school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 groups of control children. Method: Twenty-four children with SLI, 18 age-matched…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kapantzoglou, Maria; Fergadiotis, Gerasimos; Restrepo, M. Adelaida
2017-01-01
Purpose: This study examined whether the language sample elicitation technique (i.e., storytelling and story-retelling tasks with pictorial support) affects lexical diversity (D), grammaticality (grammatical errors per communication unit [GE/CU]), sentence length (mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]), and sentence complexity (subordination…
Percha, Bethany; Altman, Russ B
2013-01-01
The biomedical literature presents a uniquely challenging text mining problem. Sentences are long and complex, the subject matter is highly specialized with a distinct vocabulary, and producing annotated training data for this domain is time consuming and expensive. In this environment, unsupervised text mining methods that do not rely on annotated training data are valuable. Here we investigate the use of random indexing, an automated method for producing vector-space semantic representations of words from large, unlabeled corpora, to address the problem of term normalization in sentences describing drugs and genes. We show that random indexing produces similarity scores that capture some of the structure of PHARE, a manually curated ontology of pharmacogenomics concepts. We further show that random indexing can be used to identify likely word candidates for inclusion in the ontology, and can help localize these new labels among classes and roles within the ontology.
Percha, Bethany; Altman, Russ B.
2013-01-01
The biomedical literature presents a uniquely challenging text mining problem. Sentences are long and complex, the subject matter is highly specialized with a distinct vocabulary, and producing annotated training data for this domain is time consuming and expensive. In this environment, unsupervised text mining methods that do not rely on annotated training data are valuable. Here we investigate the use of random indexing, an automated method for producing vector-space semantic representations of words from large, unlabeled corpora, to address the problem of term normalization in sentences describing drugs and genes. We show that random indexing produces similarity scores that capture some of the structure of PHARE, a manually curated ontology of pharmacogenomics concepts. We further show that random indexing can be used to identify likely word candidates for inclusion in the ontology, and can help localize these new labels among classes and roles within the ontology. PMID:24551397
Abstract Linguistic Structure Correlates with Temporal Activity during Naturalistic Comprehension
Brennan, Jonathan R.; Stabler, Edward P.; Van Wagenen, Sarah E.; Luh, Wen-Ming; Hale, John T.
2016-01-01
Neurolinguistic accounts of sentence comprehension identify a network of relevant brain regions, but do not detail the information flowing through them. We investigate syntactic information. Does brain activity implicate a computation over hierarchical grammars or does it simply reflect linear order, as in a Markov chain? To address this question, we quantify the cognitive states implied by alternative parsing models. We compare processing-complexity predictions from these states against fMRI timecourses from regions that have been implicated in sentence comprehension. We find that hierarchical grammars independently predict timecourses from left anterior and posterior temporal lobe. Markov models are predictive in these regions and across a broader network that includes the inferior frontal gyrus. These results suggest that while linear effects are wide-spread across the language network, certain areas in the left temporal lobe deal with abstract, hierarchical syntactic representations. PMID:27208858
2016-01-01
In a touch-screen paradigm, we recorded 3- to 7-year-olds’ (N = 108) accuracy and response times (RTs) to assess their comprehension of 2-clause sentences containing before and after. Children were influenced by order: performance was most accurate when the presentation order of the 2 clauses matched the chronological order of events: “She drank the juice, before she walked in the park” (chronological order) versus “Before she walked in the park, she drank the juice” (reverse order). Differences in RTs for correct responses varied by sentence type: accurate responses were made more speedily for sentences that afforded an incremental processing of meaning. An independent measure of memory predicted this pattern of performance. We discuss these findings in relation to children’s knowledge of connective meaning and the processing requirements of sentences containing temporal connectives. PMID:27690492
Effects of syntactic structure in the memory of concrete and abstract Chinese sentences.
Ho, C S; Chen, H C
1993-09-01
Smith (1981) found that concrete English sentences were better recognized than abstract sentences and that this concreteness effect was potent only when the concrete sentence was also affirmative but the effect switched to an opposite end when the concrete sentence was negative. These results were partially replicated in Experiment 1 by using materials from a very different language (i.e., Chinese): concrete-affirmative sentences were better remembered than concrete-negative and abstract sentences, but no reliable difference was found between the latter two types. In Experiment 2, the task was modified by using a visual presentation instead of an oral one as in Experiment 1. Both concrete-affirmative and concrete-negative sentences were better memorized then abstract ones in Experiment 2. The findings in the two experiments are explained by a combination of the dual-coding model and Marschark's (1985) item-specific and relational processing. The differential effects of experience with different language systems on processing verbal materials in memory are also discussed.
Speer, Paula; Wilshire, Carolyn E
2013-01-01
This study investigated the effect of lexical content on sentence production in nonfluent aphasia. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four with fluent aphasia, and eight controls were asked to describe pictured events in subject-verb-object sentences. Experiment 1 manipulated speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high- than with a low-frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related than when they contained unrelated lexical items. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. We propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated conceptual-lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the content drives structure (COST) hypothesis.
[Cognitive aging mechanism of signaling effects on the memory for procedural sentences].
Yamamoto, Hiroki; Shimada, Hideaki
2006-08-01
The aim of this study was to clarify the cognitive aging mechanism of signaling effects on the memory for procedural sentences. Participants were 60 younger adults (college students) and 60 older adults. Both age groups were assigned into two groups; half of each group was presented with procedural sentences with signals that highlighted their top-level structure and the other half with procedural sentences without them. Both groups were requested to perform the sentence arrangement task and the reconstruction task. Each task was composed of procedural sentences with or without signals. Results indicated that signaling supported changes in strategy utilization during the successive organizational processes and that changes in strategy utilization resulting from signaling improved the memory for procedural sentences. Moreover, age-related factors interfered with these signaling effects. This study clarified the cognitive aging mechanism of signaling effects in which signaling supports changes in the strategy utilization during organizational processes at encoding and this mediation promotes memory for procedural sentences, though disuse of the strategy utilization due to aging restrains their memory for procedural sentences.
Syntactic priming during sentence comprehension: evidence for the lexical boost.
Traxler, Matthew J; Tooley, Kristen M; Pickering, Martin J
2014-07-01
Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The experiments were designed to determine the degree to which lexical overlap between prime and target sentences produced larger effects, comparable to the widely observed "lexical boost" in production experiments (Pickering & Branigan, 1998; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). The current experiments showed that priming effects during online comprehension were in fact larger when a verb was repeated across the prime and target sentences (see also Tooley et al., 2009). The finding of larger priming effects with lexical repetition supports accounts under which syntactic form representations are connected to individual lexical items (e.g., Tomasello, 2003; Vosse & Kempen, 2000, 2009). PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.
A linguistic rule-based approach to extract drug-drug interactions from pharmacological documents.
Segura-Bedmar, Isabel; Martínez, Paloma; de Pablo-Sánchez, César
2011-03-29
A drug-drug interaction (DDI) occurs when one drug influences the level or activity of another drug. The increasing volume of the scientific literature overwhelms health care professionals trying to be kept up-to-date with all published studies on DDI. This paper describes a hybrid linguistic approach to DDI extraction that combines shallow parsing and syntactic simplification with pattern matching. Appositions and coordinate structures are interpreted based on shallow syntactic parsing provided by the UMLS MetaMap tool (MMTx). Subsequently, complex and compound sentences are broken down into clauses from which simple sentences are generated by a set of simplification rules. A pharmacist defined a set of domain-specific lexical patterns to capture the most common expressions of DDI in texts. These lexical patterns are matched with the generated sentences in order to extract DDIs. We have performed different experiments to analyze the performance of the different processes. The lexical patterns achieve a reasonable precision (67.30%), but very low recall (14.07%). The inclusion of appositions and coordinate structures helps to improve the recall (25.70%), however, precision is lower (48.69%). The detection of clauses does not improve the performance. Information Extraction (IE) techniques can provide an interesting way of reducing the time spent by health care professionals on reviewing the literature. Nevertheless, no approach has been carried out to extract DDI from texts. To the best of our knowledge, this work proposes the first integral solution for the automatic extraction of DDI from biomedical texts.
Speech rhythm facilitates syntactic ambiguity resolution: ERP evidence.
Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula; Schmidt-Kassow, Maren; Kotz, Sonja A
2013-01-01
In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a constant metric pattern of three unstressed syllables between two stressed ones that created rhythmic groups of constant size. Accuracy rates in a comprehension task revealed that participants understood rhythmically regular sentences better than rhythmically irregular ones. Furthermore, the mean amplitude of the P600 component was reduced in response to object-first sentences only when embedded in rhythmically regular but not rhythmically irregular context. This P600 reduction indicates facilitated processing of sentence structure possibly due to a decrease in processing costs for the less-preferred structure (object-first). Our data suggest an early and continuous use of rhythm by the syntactic parser and support language processing models assuming an interactive and incremental use of linguistic information during language processing.
Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence
Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula; Schmidt-Kassow, Maren; Kotz, Sonja A.
2013-01-01
In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a constant metric pattern of three unstressed syllables between two stressed ones that created rhythmic groups of constant size. Accuracy rates in a comprehension task revealed that participants understood rhythmically regular sentences better than rhythmically irregular ones. Furthermore, the mean amplitude of the P600 component was reduced in response to object-first sentences only when embedded in rhythmically regular but not rhythmically irregular context. This P600 reduction indicates facilitated processing of sentence structure possibly due to a decrease in processing costs for the less-preferred structure (object-first). Our data suggest an early and continuous use of rhythm by the syntactic parser and support language processing models assuming an interactive and incremental use of linguistic information during language processing. PMID:23409109
Mueller, Jutta L; Rueschemeyer, Shirley-Ann; Ono, Kentaro; Sugiura, Motoaki; Sadato, Norihiro; Nakamura, Akinori
2014-01-01
The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of language acquisition in a realistic learning environment. Japanese native speakers were trained in a miniature version of German prior to fMRI scanning. During scanning they listened to (1) familiar sentences, (2) sentences including a novel sentence structure, and (3) sentences containing a novel word while visual context provided referential information. Learning-related decreases of brain activation over time were found in a mainly left-hemispheric network comprising classical frontal and temporal language areas as well as parietal and subcortical regions and were largely overlapping for novel words and the novel sentence structure in initial stages of learning. Differences occurred at later stages of learning during which content-specific activation patterns in prefrontal, parietal and temporal cortices emerged. The results are taken as evidence for a domain-general network supporting the initial stages of language learning which dynamically adapts as learners become proficient.
Rapid extraction of gist from visual text and its influence on word recognition.
Asano, Michiko; Yokosawa, Kazuhiko
2011-01-01
Two experiments explored rapid extraction of gist from a visual text and its influence on word recognition. In both, a short text (sentence) containing a target word was presented for 200 ms and was followed by a target recognition task. Results showed that participants recognized contextually anomalous word targets less frequently than contextually consistent counterparts (Experiment 1). This context effect was obtained when sentences contained the same semantic content but with disrupted syntactic structure (Experiment 2). Results demonstrate that words in a briefly presented visual sentence are processed in parallel and that rapid extraction of sentence gist relies on a primitive representation of sentence context (termed protocontext) that is semantically activated by the simultaneous presentation of multiple words (i.e., a sentence) before syntactic processing.
Dislocation or Afterthought?--A Conversation Analytic Account of Incremental Sentences in Chinese
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Luke, Kang-kwong
2012-01-01
For almost 80 years, Chinese linguists have been fascinated by sentences like "Pijiu ba, he dianr!" ("Beer, I'll have some!"), which look superficially like a jumbled-up version of "normal-order sentences." Numerous accounts have been proposed to explain their structure and meaning, but no consensus has been reached as to how their true essence…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Horn, Vivian Josephine
This study examined "signals" of relationships between sentences that might be helpful in teaching reading to non-native speakers of English. Logical relationships were given special attention and classified to determine if they could be contained within a limited list to be used for teaching purposes. Five hundred paragraphs (2,720 sentences)…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Luka, B.J.; Barsalou, L.W.
2005-01-01
In five experiments, participants first read grammatical sentences of English and later rated identical, structurally similar, or novel sentences for grammatical acceptability. The experimental method was modeled after ''mere exposure'' and artificial grammar learning paradigms in which preference ratings are enhanced by prior experience with the…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Stern, Carolyn; Keislar, Evan
In an attempt to explore a systematic approach to language expansion and improved sentence structure, echoic and modeling procedures for language instruction were compared. Four hypotheses were formulated: (1) children who use modeling procedures will produce better structured sentences than children who use echoic prompting, (2) both echoic and…
Can We Separate Verbs from Their Argument Structure? A Group Study in Aphasia
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Caley, Sarah; Whitworth, Anne; Claessen, Mary
2017-01-01
Background: Given the integral role that verbs play in sentence production, understanding verb deficits is critical to clinical practice. Difficulties in sentence production are often directly related to an inability to retrieve argument structure information which, according to most theoretical accounts, is specified at a lexical level as part of…
Vocabulary and Sentence Structure in Emergent Spanish Literacy
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Briceño, Allison
2016-01-01
Dual language and bilingual education programs are increasing in number and popularity across the country. However, little information is available on how to teach children to read and write in Spanish. This article explores some of the similarities and differences in vocabulary and sentence structure in Spanish and English and considers the…
Opposite Effects of Context on Immediate Structural and Lexical Processing.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Harris, John W.
The testing of a number of hypotheses about the effect of hearing a prior context sentence on immediate processing of a subsequent target sentence is described. According to the standard deep structure model, higher level processing (e.g. semantic interpretation, integration of context-tarqet information) does not occur immediately as speech is…
Zarcone, Alessandra; Padó, Sebastian; Lenci, Alessandro
2014-06-01
Logical metonymy resolution (begin a book → begin reading a book or begin writing a book) has traditionally been explained either through complex lexical entries (qualia structures) or through the integration of the implicit event via post-lexical access to world knowledge. We propose that recent work within the words-as-cues paradigm can provide a more dynamic model of logical metonymy, accounting for early and dynamic integration of complex event information depending on previous contextual cues (agent and patient). We first present a self-paced reading experiment on German subordinate sentences, where metonymic sentences and their paraphrased version differ only in the presence or absence of the clause-final target verb (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → Der Konditor begann, die Glasur aufzutragen/The baker began the icing → The baker began spreading the icing). Longer reading times at the target verb position in a high-typicality condition (baker + icing → spread ) compared to a low-typicality (but still plausible) condition (child + icing → spread) suggest that we make use of knowledge activated by lexical cues to build expectations about events. The early and dynamic integration of event knowledge in metonymy interpretation is bolstered by further evidence from a second experiment using the probe recognition paradigm. Presenting covert events as probes following a high-typicality or a low-typicality metonymic sentence (Der Konditor begann die Glasur → AUFTRAGEN/The baker began the icing → SPREAD), we obtain an analogous effect of typicality at 100 ms interstimulus interval. © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Levy, Joshua; Hoover, Elizabeth; Waters, Gloria; Kiran, Swathi; Caplan, David; Berardino, Alex; Sandberg, Chaleece
2012-01-01
Purpose: Prior studies of discourse comprehension have concluded that the deficits of persons with aphasia (PWA) in syntactically based comprehension of sentences in isolation are not predictive of deficits in comprehension of sentences in discourse (Brookshire & Nicholas, 1984; Caplan & Evans, 1990). However, these studies used semantically…
Complex Sentences: Searching for the Purpose of Education inside a Massachusetts State Prison
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Smith, Clint
2017-01-01
While policy makers and scholars often measure the success of prison education programs by quantitative outcomes such as recidivism and post-release employment, there is a gap in the literature with regard to how these programs facilitate community building, identity development, and agency. For the 159,000 people serving life sentences in the…
Sentence Position and Syntactic Complexity of Stuttering in Early Childhood: A Longitudinal Study
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Buhr, Anthony; Zebrowski, Patricia
2009-01-01
The purpose of the present investigation was to assess longitudinal word- and sentence-level measures of stuttering in young children. Participants included 12 stuttering and non-stuttering children between 36 and 71 months of age at an initial visit who exhibited a range of stuttering rates. Parent-child spontaneous speech samples were obtained…
Verb bias and verb-specific competition effects on sentence production
Thothathiri, Malathi; Evans, Daniel G.; Poudel, Sonali
2017-01-01
How do speakers choose between structural options for expressing a given meaning? Overall preference for some structures over others as well as prior statistical association between specific verbs and sentence structures (“verb bias”) are known to broadly influence language use. However, the effects of prior statistical experience on the planning and execution of utterances and the mechanisms that facilitate structural choice for verbs with different biases have not been fully explored. In this study, we manipulated verb bias for English double-object (DO) and prepositional-object (PO) dative structures: some verbs appeared solely in the DO structure (DO-only), others solely in PO (PO-only) and yet others equally in both (Equi). Structural choices during subsequent free-choice sentence production revealed the expected dispreference for DO overall but critically also a reliable linear trend in DO production that was consistent with verb bias (DO-only > Equi > PO-only). Going beyond the general verb bias effect, three results suggested that Equi verbs, which were associated equally with the two structures, engendered verb-specific competition and required additional resources for choosing the dispreferred DO structure. First, DO production with Equi verbs but not the other verbs correlated with participants’ inhibition ability. Second, utterance duration prior to the choice of a DO structure showed a quadratic trend (DO-only < Equi > PO-only) with the longest durations for Equi verbs. Third, eye movements consistent with reimagining the event also showed a quadratic trend (DO-only < Equi > PO-only) prior to choosing DO, suggesting that participants used such recall particularly for Equi verbs. Together, these analyses of structural choices, utterance durations, eye movements and individual differences in executive functions shed light on the effects of verb bias and verb-specific competition on sentence production and the role of different executive functions in choosing between sentence structures. PMID:28672009
Thothathiri, Malathi; Rattinger, Michelle G.
2016-01-01
Learning to produce sentences involves learning patterns that enable the generation of new utterances. Language contains both verb-specific and verb-general regularities that are relevant to this capacity. Previous research has focused on whether one source is more important than the other. We tested whether the production system can flexibly learn to use either source, depending on the predictive validity of different cues in the input. Participants learned new sentence structures in a miniature language paradigm. In three experiments, we manipulated whether individual verbs or verb-general mappings better predicted the structures heard during learning. Evaluation of participants’ subsequent production revealed that they could use either the structural preferences of individual verbs or abstract meaning-to-form mappings to construct new sentences. Further, this choice varied according to cue validity. These results demonstrate flexibility within the production architecture and the importance of considering how language was learned when discussing how language is used. PMID:27047428
Kao, Chung-Shan; Dietrich, Rainer; Sommer, Werner
2010-01-01
Background Languages differ in the marking of the sentence mood of a polar interrogative (yes/no question). For instance, the interrogative mood is marked at the beginning of the surface structure in Polish, whereas the marker appears at the end in Chinese. In order to generate the corresponding sentence frame, the syntactic specification of the interrogative mood is early in Polish and late in Chinese. In this respect, German belongs to an interesting intermediate class. The yes/no question is expressed by a shift of the finite verb from its final position in the underlying structure into the utterance initial position, a move affecting, hence, both the sentence's final and the sentence's initial constituents. The present study aimed to investigate whether during generation of the semantic structure of a polar interrogative, i.e., the processing preceding the grammatical formulation, the interrogative mood is encoded according to its position in the syntactic structure at distinctive time points in Chinese, German, and Polish. Methodology/Principal Findings In a two-choice go/nogo experimental design, native speakers of the three languages responded to pictures by pressing buttons and producing utterances in their native language while their brain potentials were recorded. The emergence and latency of lateralized readiness potentials (LRP) in nogo conditions, in which speakers asked a yes/no question, should indicate the time point of processing the interrogative mood. The results revealed that Chinese, German, and Polish native speakers did not differ from each other in the electrophysiological indicator. Conclusions/Significance The findings suggest that the semantic encoding of the interrogative mood is temporally consistent across languages despite its disparate syntactic specification. The consistent encoding may be ascribed to economic processing of interrogative moods at various sentential positions of the syntactic structures in languages or, more generally, to the overarching status of sentence mood in the semantic structure. PMID:20927373
Simplifying informed consent for biorepositories: stakeholder perspectives.
Beskow, Laura M; Friedman, Joëlle Y; Hardy, N Chantelle; Lin, Li; Weinfurt, Kevin P
2010-09-01
Complex and sometimes controversial information must be conveyed during the consent process for participation in biorepositories, and studies suggest that consent documents in general are growing in length and complexity. As a first step toward creating a simplified biorepository consent form, we gathered data from multiple stakeholders about what information was most important for prospective participants to know when making a decision about taking part in a biorepository. We recruited 52 research participants, 12 researchers, and 20 institutional review board representatives from Durham and Kannapolis, NC. These subjects were asked to read a model biorepository consent form and highlight sentences they deemed most important. On average, institutional review board representatives identified 72.3% of the sentences as important; researchers selected 53.0%, and participants 40.4% (P = 0.0004). Participants most often selected sentences about the kinds of individual research results that might be offered, privacy risks, and large-scale data sharing. Researchers highlighted sentences about the biorepository's purpose, privacy protections, costs, and participant access to individual results. Institutional review board representatives highlighted sentences about collection of basic personal information, medical record access, and duration of storage. The differing mandates of these three groups can translate into widely divergent opinions about what information is important and appropriate to include a consent form. These differences could frustrate efforts to move simplified forms--for biobanking as well as for other kinds of research--into actual use, despite continued calls for such forms.
Wang, J Jessica; Ali, Muna; Frisson, Steven; Apperly, Ian A
2016-09-01
Basic competence in theory of mind is acquired during early childhood. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that the ability to take others' perspectives in communication improves continuously from middle childhood to the late teenage years. This indicates that theory of mind performance undergoes protracted developmental changes after the acquisition of basic competence. Currently, little is known about the factors that constrain children's performance or that contribute to age-related improvement. A sample of 39 8-year-olds and 56 10-year-olds were tested on a communication task in which a speaker's limited perspective needed to be taken into account and the complexity of the speaker's utterance varied. Our findings showed that 10-year-olds were generally less egocentric than 8-year-olds. Children of both ages committed more egocentric errors when a speaker uttered complex sentences compared with simple sentences. Both 8- and 10-year-olds were affected by the demand to integrate complex sentences with the speaker's limited perspective and to a similar degree. These results suggest that long after children's development of simple visual perspective-taking, their use of this ability to assist communication is substantially constrained by the complexity of the language involved. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Conroy, Mark A.; Cupples, Linda
2011-01-01
This study investigated sentence-processing strategies adopted by advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs) of English in the context of an English structure with which NNSs reportedly have an acquisition difficulty (e.g., Swan & Smith, 2001)--namely, modal perfect (MP). Participants read MP sentences such as "He could have…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Ross, Robert N.
This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…
Two-Year-Olds Compute Syntactic Structure On-Line
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bernal, Savita; Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine; Millotte, Severine; Christophe, Anne
2010-01-01
Syntax allows human beings to build an infinite number of new sentences from a finite stock of words. Because toddlers typically utter only one or two words at a time, they have been thought to have no syntax. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we demonstrated that 2-year-olds do compute syntactic structure when listening to spoken sentences.…
Elaboration over a Discourse Facilitates Retrieval in Sentence Processing
Troyer, Melissa; Hofmeister, Philip; Kutas, Marta
2016-01-01
Language comprehension requires access to stored knowledge and the ability to combine knowledge in new, meaningful ways. Previous work has shown that processing linguistically more complex expressions (‘Texas cattle rancher’ vs. ‘rancher’) leads to slow-downs in reading during initial processing, possibly reflecting effort in combining information. Conversely, when this information must subsequently be retrieved (as in filler-gap constructions), processing is facilitated for more complex expressions, possibly because more semantic cues are available during retrieval. To follow up on this hypothesis, we tested whether information distributed across a short discourse can similarly provide effective cues for retrieval. Participants read texts introducing two referents (e.g., two senators), one of whom was described in greater detail than the other (e.g., ‘The Democrat had voted for one of the senators, and the Republican had voted for the other, a man from Ohio who was running for president’). The final sentence (e.g., ‘The senator who the {Republican/Democrat}had voted for…’) contained a relative clause picking out either the Many-Cue referent (with ‘Republican’) or the One-Cue referent (with ‘Democrat’). We predicted facilitated retrieval (faster reading times) for the Many-Cue condition at the verb region (‘had voted for’), where readers could understand that ‘The senator’ is the object of the verb. As predicted, this pattern was observed at the retrieval region and continued throughout the rest of the sentence. Participants also completed the Author/Magazine Recognition Tests (ART/MRT; Stanovich and West, 1989), providing a proxy for world knowledge. Since higher ART/MRT scores may index (a) greater experience accessing relevant knowledge and/or (b) richer/more highly structured representations in semantic memory, we predicted it would be positively associated with effects of elaboration on retrieval. We did not observe the predicted interaction between ART/MRT scores and Cue condition at the retrieval region, though ART/MRT interacted with Cue condition in other locations in the sentence. In sum, we found that providing more elaborative information over the course of a text can facilitate retrieval for referents, consistent with a framework in which referential elaboration over a discourse and not just local linguistic information directly impacts information retrieval during sentence processing. PMID:27014172
Fortunato-Tavares, Talita; de Andrade, Claudia R. F.; Befi-Lopes, Debora M.; Hestvik, Arild; Epstein, Baila; Tornyova, Lidiya; Schwartz, Richard G.
2013-01-01
Purpose In this study, the authors examined the comprehension of sentences with predicates and reflexives that are linked to a nonadjacent noun as a test of the hierarchical ordering deficit (HOD) hypothesis. That hypothesis and more modern versions posit that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have difficulty in establishing nonadjacent (hierarchical) relations among elements of a sentence. The authors also tested whether additional working memory demands in constructions containing reflexives affected the extent to which children with SLI incorrectly structure sentences as indicated by their picture-pointing comprehension responses. Method Sixteen Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children (8;4–l 0;6 [years;months]) with SLI and 16 children with typical language development (TLD) matched for age (±3 months), gender, and socioeconomic status participated in 2 experiments (predicate and reflexive interpretation). In the reflexive experiment, the authors also manipulated working memory demands. Each experiment involved a 4-choice picture selection sentence comprehension task. Results Children with SLI were significantly less accurate on all conditions. Both groups made more hierarchical syntactic construction errors in the long working memory condition than in the short working memory condition. Conclusion The HOD hypothesis was not confirmed. For both groups, syntactic factors (structural assignment) were more vulnerable than lexical factors (prepositions) to working memory effects in sentence miscomprehension. PMID:22232402
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Blything, Liam P.; Davies, Robert; Cain, Kate
2015-01-01
The present study investigated 3- to 7-year-olds' (N = 91) comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after. The youngest children used an order of mention strategy to interpret the relation between clauses: They were more accurate when the presentation order matched the chronological order of events:…
Verbs in the lexicon: Why is hitting easier than breaking?
McKoon, Gail; Love, Jessica
2011-11-01
Adult speakers use verbs in syntactically appropriate ways. For example, they know implicitly that the boy hit at the fence is acceptable but the boy broke at the fence is not. We suggest that this knowledge is lexically encoded in semantic decompositions. The decomposition for break verbs (e.g. crack, smash) is hypothesized to be more complex than that for hit verbs (e.g. kick, kiss). Specifically, the decomposition of a break verb denotes that "an entity changes state as the result of some external force" whereas the decomposition for a hit verb denotes only that "an entity potentially comes in contact with another entity." In this article, verbs of the two types were compared in a lexical decision experiment - Experiment 1 - and they were compared in sentence comprehension experiments with transitive sentences (e.g. the car hit the bicycle and the car broke the bicycle) - Experiments 2 and 3. In Experiment 1, processing times were shorter for the hit than the break verbs and in Experiments 2 and 3, processing times were shorter for the hit sentences than the break sentences, results that are in accord with the complexities of the postulated semantic decompositions.
The MP (Materialization Pattern) Model for Representing Math Educational Standards
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Choi, Namyoun; Song, Il-Yeol; An, Yuan
Representing natural languages with UML has been an important research issue for various reasons. Little work has been done for modeling imperative mood sentences which are the sentence structure of math educational standard statements. In this paper, we propose the MP (Materialization Pattern) model that captures the semantics of English sentences used in math educational standards. The MP model is based on the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagrams and creates MP schemas with the UML notation. The MP model explicitly represents the semantics of the sentences by extracting math concepts and the cognitive process of math concepts from math educational standard statements, and simplifies modeling. This MP model is also developed to be used for aligning math educational standard statements via schema matching.
Task effects on BOLD signal correlates of implicit syntactic processing
Caplan, David
2010-01-01
BOLD signal was measured in sixteen participants who made timed font change detection judgments in visually presented sentences that varied in syntactic structure and the order of animate and inanimate nouns. Behavioral data indicated that sentences were processed to the level of syntactic structure. BOLD signal increased in visual association areas bilaterally and left supramarginal gyrus in the contrast of sentences with object- and subject-extracted relative clauses without font changes in which the animacy order of the nouns biased against the syntactically determined meaning of the sentence. This result differs from the findings in a non-word detection task (Caplan et al, 2008a), in which the same contrast led to increased BOLD signal in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The difference in areas of activation indicates that the sentences were processed differently in the two tasks. These differences were further explored in an eye tracking study using the materials in the two tasks. Issues pertaining to how parsing and interpretive operations are affected by a task that is being performed, and how this might affect BOLD signal correlates of syntactic contrasts, are discussed. PMID:20671983
Task effects on BOLD signal correlates of implicit syntactic processing.
Caplan, David
2010-07-01
BOLD signal was measured in sixteen participants who made timed font change detection judgments in visually presented sentences that varied in syntactic structure and the order of animate and inanimate nouns. Behavioral data indicated that sentences were processed to the level of syntactic structure. BOLD signal increased in visual association areas bilaterally and left supramarginal gyrus in the contrast of sentences with object- and subject-extracted relative clauses without font changes in which the animacy order of the nouns biased against the syntactically determined meaning of the sentence. This result differs from the findings in a non-word detection task (Caplan et al, 2008a), in which the same contrast led to increased BOLD signal in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The difference in areas of activation indicates that the sentences were processed differently in the two tasks. These differences were further explored in an eye tracking study using the materials in the two tasks. Issues pertaining to how parsing and interpretive operations are affected by a task that is being performed, and how this might affect BOLD signal correlates of syntactic contrasts, are discussed.
Sign language ability in young deaf signers predicts comprehension of written sentences in English.
Andrew, Kathy N; Hoshooley, Jennifer; Joanisse, Marc F
2014-01-01
We investigated the robust correlation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English reading ability in 51 young deaf signers ages 7;3 to 19;0. Signers were divided into 'skilled' and 'less-skilled' signer groups based on their performance on three measures of ASL. We next assessed reading comprehension of four English sentence structures (actives, passives, pronouns, reflexive pronouns) using a sentence-to-picture-matching task. Of interest was the extent to which ASL proficiency provided a foundation for lexical and syntactic processes of English. Skilled signers outperformed less-skilled signers overall. Error analyses further indicated greater single-word recognition difficulties in less-skilled signers marked by a higher rate of errors reflecting an inability to identify the actors and actions described in the sentence. Our findings provide evidence that increased ASL ability supports English sentence comprehension both at the levels of individual words and syntax. This is consistent with the theory that first language learning promotes second language through transference of linguistic elements irrespective of the transparency of mapping of grammatical structures between the two languages.
Sign Language Ability in Young Deaf Signers Predicts Comprehension of Written Sentences in English
Andrew, Kathy N.; Hoshooley, Jennifer; Joanisse, Marc F.
2014-01-01
We investigated the robust correlation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English reading ability in 51 young deaf signers ages 7;3 to 19;0. Signers were divided into ‘skilled’ and ‘less-skilled’ signer groups based on their performance on three measures of ASL. We next assessed reading comprehension of four English sentence structures (actives, passives, pronouns, reflexive pronouns) using a sentence-to-picture-matching task. Of interest was the extent to which ASL proficiency provided a foundation for lexical and syntactic processes of English. Skilled signers outperformed less-skilled signers overall. Error analyses further indicated greater single-word recognition difficulties in less-skilled signers marked by a higher rate of errors reflecting an inability to identify the actors and actions described in the sentence. Our findings provide evidence that increased ASL ability supports English sentence comprehension both at the levels of individual words and syntax. This is consistent with the theory that first language learning promotes second language through transference of linguistic elements irrespective of the transparency of mapping of grammatical structures between the two languages. PMID:24587174
Acquisition How to Guide: Planning, Preparing, and Processing Acquisition Packages
1993-08-01
of Task Outline. In very simple acquisitions, the project officer or COR, with the advice and counsel of the Contract Specialist, may...three concise sentences , each limited to a single idea. Use simple sentence structure (i.e., subject-verb-complement/object). The natural order of words... in a sentence tells the function of each word. Use a paragraph to state a single idea and elaborate on it. State the
Communicating with sentences: A multi-word naming game model
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Lou, Yang; Chen, Guanrong; Hu, Jianwei
2018-01-01
Naming game simulates the process of naming an object by a single word, in which a population of communicating agents can reach global consensus asymptotically through iteratively pair-wise conversations. We propose an extension of the single-word model to a multi-word naming game (MWNG), simulating the case of describing a complex object by a sentence (multiple words). Words are defined in categories, and then organized as sentences by combining them from different categories. We refer to a formatted combination of several words as a pattern. In such an MWNG, through a pair-wise conversation, it requires the hearer to achieve consensus with the speaker with respect to both every single word in the sentence as well as the sentence pattern, so as to guarantee the correct meaning of the saying; otherwise, they fail reaching consensus in the interaction. We validate the model in three typical topologies as the underlying communication network, and employ both conventional and man-designed patterns in performing the MWNG.
Pettenati, P.; Benassi, E.; Deevy, P.; Leonard, L.B.; Caselli, M.C.
2014-01-01
Background Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) have deficits in sentence comprehension. These deficits are usually attributed to limitations in the children’s understanding of syntax or the lexical items contained in the sentences. In this study, we examine the role that extra-linguistic factors can play in these children’s sentence comprehension. Aims In this study, extra-linguistic demands on sentence comprehension were manipulated directly by varying the nature of the materials used. Methods & Procedure Forty-five Italian-speaking children participated: 15 with SLI (M age = 4;5), 15 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A, M age = 4;5), and 15 younger typically developing children matched according to language comprehension test scores (TD-Y, M age = 3;9). The children responded to sentence comprehension items that varied in their length and/or in the number and type of foils that competed with the target picture. Outcome & Results The TD-A children were more accurate than the TD-Y children and the children with SLI, but, for all groups, accuracy declined when task demands increased. In particular, sentences containing superfluous adjectives (e.g., Il topo bello copre l’uccello allegro “The nice mouse covers the happy bird” where all depicted mice were nice and all birds were happy) yielded higher scores than similar sentences in which each adjective had to be associated with the proper character (e.g., Il cane giallo lava il maiale bianco “The yellow dog washes the white pig” where foils included a yellow dog washing a pink pig, and a brown dog washing a white pig). Many errors reflected recency effects, probably influenced by the fact that adjectives modifying the object appear at the end of the sentence in Italian. Conclusions & Implications Differences between conditions were observed even when lexical content, syntactic structure, and sentence length were controlled. This finding suggests the need for great care when assessing children’s comprehension of sentences. The same syntactic structure and lexical content can vary in difficulty depending on the number and types of foils that are used in combination with the target picture. PMID:25469803
Pettenati, P; Benassi, E; Deevy, P; Leonard, L B; Caselli, M C
2015-01-01
Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) in sentence comprehension. These deficits are usually attributed to limitations in the children's understanding of syntax or the lexical items contained in the sentences. This study examines the role that extra-linguistic factors can play in these children's sentence comprehension. Extra-linguistic demands on sentence comprehension are manipulated directly by varying the nature of the materials used. Forty-five Italian-speaking children participated: 15 with SLI (mean age = 4;5), 15 typically developing children matched for age (TD-A, mean age = 4;5), and 15 younger typically developing children matched according to language comprehension test scores (TD-Y, mean age = 3;9). The children responded to sentence comprehension items that varied in their length and/or the number and type of foils that competed with the target picture. The TD-A children were more accurate than the TD-Y children and the children with SLI, but, for all groups, accuracy declined when task demands increased. In particular, sentences containing superfluous adjectives (e.g., Il topo bello copre l'uccello allegro, 'The nice mouse covers the happy bird' where all depicted mice were nice and all birds were happy) yielded higher scores than similar sentences in which each adjective had to be associated with the proper character (e.g., Il cane giallo lava il maiale bianco, 'The yellow dog washes the white pig', where foils included a yellow dog washing a pink pig, and a brown dog washing a white pig). Many errors reflected recency effects, probably influenced by the fact that adjectives modifying the object appear at the end of the sentence in Italian. Differences between conditions were observed even when lexical content, syntactic structure and sentence length were controlled. This finding suggests the need for great care when assessing children's comprehension of sentences. The same syntactic structure and lexical content can vary in difficulty depending on the number and types of foils used in combination with the target picture. © 2014 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.
Frizelle, Pauline; O'Neill, Clodagh; Bishop, Dorothy V M
2017-11-01
Although sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice picture-matching sentence comprehension task and a sentence repetition task. Thirty-three typically developing children completed both assessments, which included relative clauses representing a range of syntactic roles. Results revealed a similar order of difficulty of constructions on both measures but little agreement between them when evaluating individual differences. Interestingly, repetition was the easier of the two measures, with children showing the ability to repeat sentences they did not understand. This discrepancy is primarily attributed to the additional processing load resulting from the design of multiple-choice comprehension tasks, and highlights the fact that these assessments are invoking skills beyond those of linguistic competence.
Dynamic evocation of hand action representations during sentence comprehension.
Masson, Michael E J; Bub, Daniel N; Lavelle, Hillary
2013-08-01
When listening to a sentence describing an interaction with a manipulable object, understanding the actor's intentions is shown to have a striking influence on action representations evoked during comprehension. Subjects performed a cued reach and grasp response while listening to a context sentence. Responses were primed when they were consistent with the proximal intention of an actor ("John lifted the cell phone..."), but this effect was evanescent and appeared only when sentences mentioned the proximal intention first. When the sentence structure was changed to mention the distal intention first ("To clear the shelf..."), priming effects were no longer context specific and actions pertaining to the function of an object were clearly favored. These results are not compatible with a straightforward mental-simulation account of sentence comprehension but instead reflect a hierarchy of intentions distinguishing how and why actions are performed. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.
A bootstrapping method for development of Treebank
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Zarei, F.; Basirat, A.; Faili, H.; Mirain, M.
2017-01-01
Using statistical approaches beside the traditional methods of natural language processing could significantly improve both the quality and performance of several natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The effective usage of these approaches is subject to the availability of the informative, accurate and detailed corpora on which the learners are trained. This article introduces a bootstrapping method for developing annotated corpora based on a complex and rich linguistically motivated elementary structure called supertag. To this end, a hybrid method for supertagging is proposed that combines both of the generative and discriminative methods of supertagging. The method was applied on a subset of Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in order to annotate its sentences with a set of linguistically motivated elementary structures of the English XTAG grammar that is using a lexicalised tree-adjoining grammar formalism. The empirical results confirm that the bootstrapping method provides a satisfactory way for annotating the English sentences with the mentioned structures. The experiments show that the method could automatically annotate about 20% of WSJ with the accuracy of F-measure about 80% of which is particularly 12% higher than the F-measure of the XTAG Treebank automatically generated from the approach proposed by Basirat and Faili [(2013). Bridge the gap between statistical and hand-crafted grammars. Computer Speech and Language, 27, 1085-1104].
Fogerty, Daniel
2011-01-01
The speech signal may be divided into frequency bands, each containing temporal properties of the envelope and fine structure. For maximal speech understanding, listeners must allocate their perceptual resources to the most informative acoustic properties. Understanding this perceptual weighting is essential for the design of assistive listening devices that need to preserve these important speech cues. This study measured the perceptual weighting of young normal-hearing listeners for the envelope and fine structure in each of three frequency bands for sentence materials. Perceptual weights were obtained under two listening contexts: (1) when each acoustic property was presented individually and (2) when multiple acoustic properties were available concurrently. The processing method was designed to vary the availability of each acoustic property independently by adding noise at different levels. Perceptual weights were determined by correlating a listener’s performance with the availability of each acoustic property on a trial-by-trial basis. Results demonstrated that weights were (1) equal when acoustic properties were presented individually and (2) biased toward envelope and mid-frequency information when multiple properties were available. Results suggest a complex interaction between the available acoustic properties and the listening context in determining how best to allocate perceptual resources when listening to speech in noise. PMID:21361454
Sentence-Structure Priming in Young Children Who Do and Do Not Stutter
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Anderson, Julie D.; Conture, Edward G.
2004-01-01
The purpose of this study was to use an age-appropriate version of the sentence-structure priming paradigm (e.g., K. Bock, 1990; K. Bock, H. Loebell, & R. Morey, 1992) to assess experimentally the syntactic processing abilities of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 16 CWS and 16 CWNS between the…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bisiada, Mario
2016-01-01
Sentence splitting is assumed to occur mainly in translations from languages that prefer a hierarchical discourse structure, such as German, to languages that prefer an incremental structure. This article challenges that assumption by presenting findings from a diachronic corpus study of English-German business article translations, which shows…
Informativeness ratings of messages created on an AAC processing prosthesis
Bartlett, Megan R.; Fink, Ruth B.; Schwartz, Myrna F.; Linebarger, Marcia
2008-01-01
Background SentenceShaper™ (SSR) is a computer program that supports spoken language production in aphasia by recording and storing the fragments that the user speaks into the microphone, making them available for playback and allowing them to be combined and integrated into larger structures (i.e., sentences and narratives). A prior study that measured utterance length and grammatical complexity in story-plot narratives produced with and without the aid of SentenceShaper demonstrated an “aided effect” in some speakers with aphasia, meaning an advantage for the narratives that were produced with the support of this communication aid (Linebarger, Schwartz, Romania, Kohn, & Stephens, 2000). The present study deviated from Linebarger et al.’s methods in key respects and again showed aided effects of SentenceShaper in persons with aphasia. Aims Aims were (1) to demonstrate aided effects in “functional narratives” conveying hypothetical real-life situations from a first person perspective; (2) for the first time, to submit aided and spontaneous speech samples to listener judgements of informativeness; and (3) to produce preliminary evidence on topic-specific carryover from SentenceShaper, i.e., carryover from an aided production to a subsequent unaided production on the same topic. Methods & Procedures Five individuals with chronic aphasia created narratives on two topics, under three conditions: Unaided (U), Aided (SSR), and Post-SSR Unaided (Post-U). The 30 samples (5 participants, 2 topics, 3 conditions) were randomised and judged for informativeness by graduate students in speech-language pathology. The method for rating was Direct Magnitude Estimation (DME). Outcomes & Results Repeated measures ANOVAs were performed on DME ratings for each participant on each topic. A main effect of Condition was present for four of the five participants, on one or both topics. Planned contrasts revealed that the aided effect (SSR >U) was significant in each of these cases. For two participants, there was also topic-specific carryover (Post-U >U). Conclusions Listeners judged functional narratives generated on SentenceShaper to be more informative than comparable narratives spoken spontaneously. This extends the evidence for aided effects of SentenceShaper. There was also evidence, albeit weaker, for topic-specific carryover, suggesting that the program might be used effectively to practise for upcoming face-to-face interactions. PMID:18648580
Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure.
Kirby, Simon; Tamariz, Monica; Cornish, Hannah; Smith, Kenny
2015-08-01
Language exhibits striking systematic structure. Words are composed of combinations of reusable sounds, and those words in turn are combined to form complex sentences. These properties make language unique among natural communication systems and enable our species to convey an open-ended set of messages. We provide a cultural evolutionary account of the origins of this structure. We show, using simulations of rational learners and laboratory experiments, that structure arises from a trade-off between pressures for compressibility (imposed during learning) and expressivity (imposed during communication). We further demonstrate that the relative strength of these two pressures can be varied in different social contexts, leading to novel predictions about the emergence of structured behaviour in the wild. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Classification-based reasoning
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)
Gomez, Fernando; Segami, Carlos
1991-01-01
A representation formalism for N-ary relations, quantification, and definition of concepts is described. Three types of conditions are associated with the concepts: (1) necessary and sufficient properties, (2) contingent properties, and (3) necessary properties. Also explained is how complex chains of inferences can be accomplished by representing existentially quantified sentences, and concepts denoted by restrictive relative clauses as classification hierarchies. The representation structures that make possible the inferences are explained first, followed by the reasoning algorithms that draw the inferences from the knowledge structures. All the ideas explained have been implemented and are part of the information retrieval component of a program called Snowy. An appendix contains a brief session with the program.
De Vincenzi, M
1996-01-01
This paper presents three experiments on the parsing of Italian wh-questions that manipulate the wh-type (who vs. which-N) and the wh extraction site (main clause, dependent clause with or without complementizer). The aim of these manipulations is to see whether the parser is sensitive to the type of dependencies being processed and whether the processing effects can be explained by a unique processing principle, the minimal chain principle (MCP; De Vincenzi, 1991). The results show that the parser, following the MCP, prefers structures with fewer and less complex chains. In particular: (1) There is a processing advantage for the wh-subject extractions, the structures with less complex chains; (2) there is a processing dissociation between the who and which questions; (3) the parser respects the principle that governs the well-formedness of the empty categories (ECP).
A linguistic rule-based approach to extract drug-drug interactions from pharmacological documents
2011-01-01
Background A drug-drug interaction (DDI) occurs when one drug influences the level or activity of another drug. The increasing volume of the scientific literature overwhelms health care professionals trying to be kept up-to-date with all published studies on DDI. Methods This paper describes a hybrid linguistic approach to DDI extraction that combines shallow parsing and syntactic simplification with pattern matching. Appositions and coordinate structures are interpreted based on shallow syntactic parsing provided by the UMLS MetaMap tool (MMTx). Subsequently, complex and compound sentences are broken down into clauses from which simple sentences are generated by a set of simplification rules. A pharmacist defined a set of domain-specific lexical patterns to capture the most common expressions of DDI in texts. These lexical patterns are matched with the generated sentences in order to extract DDIs. Results We have performed different experiments to analyze the performance of the different processes. The lexical patterns achieve a reasonable precision (67.30%), but very low recall (14.07%). The inclusion of appositions and coordinate structures helps to improve the recall (25.70%), however, precision is lower (48.69%). The detection of clauses does not improve the performance. Conclusions Information Extraction (IE) techniques can provide an interesting way of reducing the time spent by health care professionals on reviewing the literature. Nevertheless, no approach has been carried out to extract DDI from texts. To the best of our knowledge, this work proposes the first integral solution for the automatic extraction of DDI from biomedical texts. PMID:21489220
A Shared Neural Substrate for Mentalizing and the Affective Component of Sentence Comprehension
Hervé, Pierre-Yves; Razafimandimby, Annick; Jobard, Gaël; Tzourio-Mazoyer, Nathalie
2013-01-01
Using event-related fMRI in a sample of 42 healthy participants, we compared the cerebral activity maps obtained when classifying spoken sentences based on the mental content of the main character (belief, deception or empathy) or on the emotional tonality of the sentence (happiness, anger or sadness). To control for the effects of different syntactic constructions (such as embedded clauses in belief sentences), we subtracted from each map the BOLD activations obtained during plausibility judgments on structurally matching sentences, devoid of emotions or ToM. The obtained theory of mind (ToM) and emotional speech comprehension networks overlapped in the bilateral temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, right anterior temporal lobe, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and in the left inferior frontal sulcus. These regions form a ToM network, which contributes to the emotional component of spoken sentence comprehension. Compared with the ToM task, in which the sentences were enounced on a neutral tone, the emotional sentence classification task, in which the sentences were play-acted, was associated with a greater activity in the bilateral superior temporal sulcus, in line with the presence of emotional prosody. Besides, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was more active during emotional than ToM sentence processing. This region may link mental state representations with verbal and prosodic emotional cues. Compared with emotional sentence classification, ToM was associated with greater activity in the caudate nucleus, paracingulate cortex, and superior frontal and parietal regions, in line with behavioral data showing that ToM sentence comprehension was a more demanding task. PMID:23342148
Establishing causal coherence across sentences: an ERP study
Kuperberg, Gina R.; Paczynski, Martin; Ditman, Tali
2011-01-01
This study examined neural activity associated with establishing causal relationships across sentences during online comprehension. ERPs were measured while participants read and judged the relatedness of three-sentence scenarios in which the final sentence was highly causally related, intermediately related and causally unrelated to its context. Lexico-semantic co-occurrence was matched across the three conditions using a Latent Semantic Analysis. Critical words in causally unrelated scenarios evoked a larger N400 than words in both highly causally related and intermediately related scenarios, regardless of whether they appeared before or at the sentence-final position. At midline sites, the N400 to intermediately related sentence-final words was attenuated to the same degree as to highly causally related words, but otherwise the N400 to intermediately related words fell in between that evoked by highly causally related and intermediately related words. No modulation of the Late Positivity/P600 component was observed across conditions. These results indicate that both simple and complex causal inferences can influence the earliest stages of semantically processing an incoming word. Further, they suggest that causal coherence, at the situation level, can influence incremental word-by-word discourse comprehension, even when semantic relationships between individual words are matched. PMID:20175676
An attention-based effective neural model for drug-drug interactions extraction.
Zheng, Wei; Lin, Hongfei; Luo, Ling; Zhao, Zhehuan; Li, Zhengguang; Zhang, Yijia; Yang, Zhihao; Wang, Jian
2017-10-10
Drug-drug interactions (DDIs) often bring unexpected side effects. The clinical recognition of DDIs is a crucial issue for both patient safety and healthcare cost control. However, although text-mining-based systems explore various methods to classify DDIs, the classification performance with regard to DDIs in long and complex sentences is still unsatisfactory. In this study, we propose an effective model that classifies DDIs from the literature by combining an attention mechanism and a recurrent neural network with long short-term memory (LSTM) units. In our approach, first, a candidate-drug-oriented input attention acting on word-embedding vectors automatically learns which words are more influential for a given drug pair. Next, the inputs merging the position- and POS-embedding vectors are passed to a bidirectional LSTM layer whose outputs at the last time step represent the high-level semantic information of the whole sentence. Finally, a softmax layer performs DDI classification. Experimental results from the DDIExtraction 2013 corpus show that our system performs the best with respect to detection and classification (84.0% and 77.3%, respectively) compared with other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, for the Medline-2013 dataset with long and complex sentences, our F-score far exceeds those of top-ranking systems by 12.6%. Our approach effectively improves the performance of DDI classification tasks. Experimental analysis demonstrates that our model performs better with respect to recognizing not only close-range but also long-range patterns among words, especially for long, complex and compound sentences.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Kueper, Christoph
1979-01-01
Compares sentence grammar with text linguistics, giving a survey of the treatment of indirect discourse in school grammars, and finding them inadequate. Recommends rules derived from text linguistics in spite of their greater complexity, because they do not hold the student to mechanical recasting of sentences. (IFS/WGA)
A grammar-based semantic similarity algorithm for natural language sentences.
Lee, Ming Che; Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng
2014-01-01
This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to "artificial language", such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure.
Brief Report: Judicial Attitudes Regarding the Sentencing of Offenders with High Functioning Autism
Berryessa, Colleen M.
2016-01-01
This brief report presents preliminary data on the attitudes of judges on the sentencing of offenders with High Functioning Autism (HFA). Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with twenty-one California Superior Court Judges. Interviews were qualitatively coded and constant comparative analysis was utilized. Findings revealed that judges consider HFA as both a mitigating and aggravating factor in sentencing, and knowledge of an offender’s disorder could potentially help judges understand why a criminal action might have been committed. Judges voiced concerns about the criminal justice system being able to effectively help or offer sentencing options for offenders with HFA. Finally, judges reported that they are focused on using their their judicial powers and influence to provide treatment and other resources during sentencing. PMID:27106568
Niikuni, Keiyu; Muramoto, Toshiaki
2014-06-01
This study explored the effects of a comma on the processing of structurally ambiguous Japanese sentences with a semantic bias. A previous study has shown that a comma which is incompatible with an ambiguous sentence's semantic bias affects the processing of the sentence, but the effects of a comma that is compatible with the bias are unclear. In the present study, we examined the role of a comma compatible with the sentence's semantic bias using the self-paced reading method, which enabled us to determine the reading times for the region of the sentence where readers would be expected to solve the ambiguity using semantic information (the "target region"). The results show that a comma significantly increases the reading time of the punctuated word but decreases the reading time in the target region. We concluded that even if the semantic information provided might be sufficient for disambiguation, the insertion of a comma would affect the processing cost of the ambiguity, indicating that readers use both the comma and semantic information in parallel for sentence processing.
Kootstra, Gerrit Jan; Rossi, Eleonora
2017-01-01
In their target article, Branigan & Pickering (B&P) briefly discuss bilingual language representation, focusing primarily on cross-language priming between single-language sentences. We follow up on this discussion by showing how structural priming drives real-life phenomena of bilingual language use beyond the priming of unilingual sentences and by arguing that B&P's account should be extended with a representation for language membership.
A semi-supervised learning framework for biomedical event extraction based on hidden topics.
Zhou, Deyu; Zhong, Dayou
2015-05-01
Scientists have devoted decades of efforts to understanding the interaction between proteins or RNA production. The information might empower the current knowledge on drug reactions or the development of certain diseases. Nevertheless, due to the lack of explicit structure, literature in life science, one of the most important sources of this information, prevents computer-based systems from accessing. Therefore, biomedical event extraction, automatically acquiring knowledge of molecular events in research articles, has attracted community-wide efforts recently. Most approaches are based on statistical models, requiring large-scale annotated corpora to precisely estimate models' parameters. However, it is usually difficult to obtain in practice. Therefore, employing un-annotated data based on semi-supervised learning for biomedical event extraction is a feasible solution and attracts more interests. In this paper, a semi-supervised learning framework based on hidden topics for biomedical event extraction is presented. In this framework, sentences in the un-annotated corpus are elaborately and automatically assigned with event annotations based on their distances to these sentences in the annotated corpus. More specifically, not only the structures of the sentences, but also the hidden topics embedded in the sentences are used for describing the distance. The sentences and newly assigned event annotations, together with the annotated corpus, are employed for training. Experiments were conducted on the multi-level event extraction corpus, a golden standard corpus. Experimental results show that more than 2.2% improvement on F-score on biomedical event extraction is achieved by the proposed framework when compared to the state-of-the-art approach. The results suggest that by incorporating un-annotated data, the proposed framework indeed improves the performance of the state-of-the-art event extraction system and the similarity between sentences might be precisely described by hidden topics and structures of the sentences. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Neurobiology of Self-Awareness in Schizophrenia: an fMRI Study
Shad, Mujeeb U.; Keshavan, Matcheri S.; Steinberg, Joel L.; Mihalakos, Perry; Thomas, Binu P.; Motes, Michael A.; Soares, Jair C.; Tamminga, Carol A.
2012-01-01
Self-awareness (SA) is one of the core domains of higher cortical functions and is frequently compromised in schizophrenia. Deficits in SA have been associated with functional and psychosocial impairment in this patient population. However, despite its clinical significance, only a few studies have examined the neural substrates of self-referential processing in schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to assess self-awareness in schizophrenia using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm designed to elicit judgments of self-reference in a simulated social context. While scanned, volunteers looked at visually-displayed sentences that had the volunteer’s own first name (self-directed sentence-stimulus) or an unknown other person’s first name (other-directed sentence stimulus) as the grammatical subject of the sentence. The volunteers were asked to discern whether each sentence-stimulus was about the volunteer personally (during a self-referential cue epoch) or asked whether each statement was about someone else (during an other-referential cue epoch). We predicted that individuals with schizophrenia would demonstrate altered functional activation to self- and other-directed sentence-stimuli as compared to controls. Fifteen controls and seventeen schizophrenia volunteers completed clinical assessments and SA fMRI task on a 3T Philips 3.0 T Achieva system. The results showed significantly greater activation in schizophrenia compared to controls for cortical midline structures in response to self- vs. other-directed sentence-stimuli. These findings support results from earlier studies and demonstrate selective alteration in the activation of cortical midline structures associated with evaluations of self-reference in schizophrenia as compared to controls. PMID:22480958
Neurobiology of self-awareness in schizophrenia: an fMRI study.
Shad, Mujeeb U; Keshavan, Matcheri S; Steinberg, Joel L; Mihalakos, Perry; Thomas, Binu P; Motes, Michael A; Soares, Jair C; Tamminga, Carol A
2012-07-01
Self-awareness (SA) is one of the core domains of higher cortical functions and is frequently compromised in schizophrenia. Deficits in SA have been associated with functional and psychosocial impairment in this patient population. However, despite its clinical significance, only a few studies have examined the neural substrates of self-referential processing in schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to assess self-awareness in schizophrenia using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm designed to elicit judgments of self-reference in a simulated social context. While scanned, volunteers looked at visually-displayed sentences that had the volunteer's own first name (self-directed sentence-stimulus) or an unknown other person's first name (other-directed sentence stimulus) as the grammatical subject of the sentence. The volunteers were asked to discern whether each sentence-stimulus was about the volunteer personally (during a self-referential cue epoch) or asked whether each statement was about someone else (during an other-referential cue epoch). We predicted that individuals with schizophrenia would demonstrate altered functional activation to self- and other-directed sentence-stimuli as compared to controls. Fifteen controls and seventeen schizophrenia volunteers completed clinical assessments and SA fMRI task on a 3T Philips 3.0 T Achieva system. The results showed significantly greater activation in schizophrenia compared to controls for cortical midline structures in response to self- vs. other-directed sentence-stimuli. These findings support results from earlier studies and demonstrate selective alteration in the activation of cortical midline structures associated with evaluations of self-reference in schizophrenia as compared to controls. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Stowe, Laurie A; Kaan, Edith; Sabourin, Laura; Taylor, Ryan C
2018-03-30
Current sentence processing research has focused on early effects of the on-line incremental processes that are performed at each word or constituent during processing. However, less attention has been devoted to what happens at the end of the clause or sentence. More specifically, over the last decade and a half, a lot of effort has been put into avoiding measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at the final word of a sentence, because of the possible effects of sentence wrap-up. This article reviews the evidence on how and when sentence wrap-up impacts behavioral and ERP results. Even though the end of the sentence is associated with a positive-going ERP wave, thus far this effect has not been associated with any factors hypothesized to affect wrap-up. In addition, ERP responses to violations have not been affected by this positivity. "Sentence-final" negativities reported in the literature are not unique to sentence final positions, nor do they obscure or distort ERP effects associated with linguistic manipulations. Finally, the empirical evidence used to argue that sentence-final ERPs are different from those recorded at sentence-medial positions is weak at most. Measuring ERPs at sentence-final positions is therefore certainly not to be avoided at all costs, especially not in cases where the structure of the language under investigation requires it. More importantly, researchers should follow rigorous method in their experimental design, avoid decision tasks which may induce ERP confounds, and ensure all other possible explanations for results are considered. Although this article is directed at a particular dogma from a particular literature, this review shows that it is important to reassess what is regarded as "general knowledge" from time to time. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Long-Range Correlations in Sentence Series from A Story of the Stone
Yang, Tianguang; Gu, Changgui; Yang, Huijie
2016-01-01
A sentence is the natural unit of language. Patterns embedded in series of sentences can be used to model the formation and evolution of languages, and to solve practical problems such as evaluating linguistic ability. In this paper, we apply de-trended fluctuation analysis to detect long-range correlations embedded in sentence series from A Story of the Stone, one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese literature. We identified a weak long-range correlation, with a Hurst exponent of 0.575±0.002 up to a scale of 104. We used the structural stability to confirm the behavior of the long-range correlation, and found that different parts of the series had almost identical Hurst exponents. We found that noisy records can lead to false results and conclusions, even if the noise covers a limited proportion of the total records (e.g., less than 1%). Thus, the structural stability test is an essential procedure for confirming the existence of long-range correlations, which has been widely neglected in previous studies. Furthermore, a combination of de-trended fluctuation analysis and diffusion entropy analysis demonstrated that the sentence series was generated by a fractional Brownian motion. PMID:27648941
Long-Range Correlations in Sentence Series from A Story of the Stone.
Yang, Tianguang; Gu, Changgui; Yang, Huijie
2016-01-01
A sentence is the natural unit of language. Patterns embedded in series of sentences can be used to model the formation and evolution of languages, and to solve practical problems such as evaluating linguistic ability. In this paper, we apply de-trended fluctuation analysis to detect long-range correlations embedded in sentence series from A Story of the Stone, one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese literature. We identified a weak long-range correlation, with a Hurst exponent of 0.575±0.002 up to a scale of 104. We used the structural stability to confirm the behavior of the long-range correlation, and found that different parts of the series had almost identical Hurst exponents. We found that noisy records can lead to false results and conclusions, even if the noise covers a limited proportion of the total records (e.g., less than 1%). Thus, the structural stability test is an essential procedure for confirming the existence of long-range correlations, which has been widely neglected in previous studies. Furthermore, a combination of de-trended fluctuation analysis and diffusion entropy analysis demonstrated that the sentence series was generated by a fractional Brownian motion.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Owen, Amanda J.
2010-01-01
Purpose: The author examined the influence of sentence type, clause order, and verb transitivity on the accuracy of children's past tense productions. All groups of children, but especially children with specific language impairment (SLI), were predicted to decrease accuracy as linguistic complexity increased. Method: The author elicited past…
Neural bases of event knowledge and syntax integration in comprehension of complex sentences.
Malaia, Evie; Newman, Sharlene
2015-01-01
Comprehension of complex sentences is necessarily supported by both syntactic and semantic knowledge, but what linguistic factors trigger a readers' reliance on a specific system? This functional neuroimaging study orthogonally manipulated argument plausibility and verb event type to investigate cortical bases of the semantic effect on argument comprehension during reading. The data suggest that telic verbs facilitate online processing by means of consolidating the event schemas in episodic memory and by easing the computation of syntactico-thematic hierarchies in the left inferior frontal gyrus. The results demonstrate that syntax-semantics integration relies on trade-offs among a distributed network of regions for maximum comprehension efficiency.
Deficit-Lesion Correlations in Syntactic Comprehension in Aphasia
Caplan, David; Michaud, Jennifer; Hufford, Rebecca; Makris, Nikos
2015-01-01
The effects of lesions on syntactic comprehension were studied in thirty one people with aphasia (PWA). Participants were tested for the ability to parse and interpret four types of syntactic structures and elements -- passives, object extracted relative clauses, reflexives and pronouns – in three tasks – object manipulation, sentence picture matching with full sentence presentation and sentence picture matching with self-paced listening presentation. Accuracy, end-of-sentence RT and self-paced listening times for each word were measured. MR scans were obtained and analyzed for total lesion volume and for lesion size in 48 cortical areas. Lesion size in several areas of the left hemisphere was related to accuracy in particular sentence types in particular tasks and to self-paced listening times for critical words in particular sentence types. The results support a model of brain organization that includes areas that are specialized for the combination of particular syntactic and interpretive operations and the use of the meanings produced by those operations to accomplish task-related operations. PMID:26688433
Deficit-lesion correlations in syntactic comprehension in aphasia.
Caplan, David; Michaud, Jennifer; Hufford, Rebecca; Makris, Nikos
2016-01-01
The effects of lesions on syntactic comprehension were studied in thirty-one people with aphasia (PWA). Participants were tested for the ability to parse and interpret four types of syntactic structures and elements - passives, object extracted relative clauses, reflexives and pronouns - in three tasks - object manipulation, sentence picture matching with full sentence presentation and sentence picture matching with self-paced listening presentation. Accuracy, end-of-sentence RT and self-paced listening times for each word were measured. MR scans were obtained and analyzed for total lesion volume and for lesion size in 48 cortical areas. Lesion size in several areas of the left hemisphere was related to accuracy in particular sentence types in particular tasks and to self-paced listening times for critical words in particular sentence types. The results support a model of brain organization that includes areas that are specialized for the combination of particular syntactic and interpretive operations and the use of the meanings produced by those operations to accomplish task-related operations. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Caplan, David; Michaud, Jennifer; Hufford, Rebecca
2013-01-01
Sixty one pwa were tested on syntactic comprehension in three tasks: sentence-picture matching, sentence-picture matching with auditory moving window presentation, and object manipulation. There were significant correlations of performances on sentences across tasks. First factors in unrotated factor analyses accounted for most of the variance on which all sentence types loaded in each task. Dissociations in performance between sentence types that differed minimally in their syntactic structures were not consistent across tasks. These results replicate previous results with smaller samples and provide important validation of basic aspects of aphasic performance in this area of language processing. They point to the role of a reduction in processing resources and of the interaction of task demands and parsing and interpretive abilities in the genesis of patient performance. PMID:24061104
A Grammar-Based Semantic Similarity Algorithm for Natural Language Sentences
Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng
2014-01-01
This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to “artificial language”, such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure. PMID:24982952
Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production.
Coco, Moreno I; Keller, Frank
2015-05-01
Situated language production requires the integration of visual attention and linguistic processing. Previous work has not conclusively disentangled the role of perceptual scene information and structural sentence information in guiding visual attention. In this paper, we present an eye-tracking study that demonstrates that three types of guidance, perceptual, conceptual, and structural, interact to control visual attention. In a cued language production experiment, we manipulate perceptual (scene clutter) and conceptual guidance (cue animacy) and measure structural guidance (syntactic complexity of the utterance). Analysis of the time course of language production, before and during speech, reveals that all three forms of guidance affect the complexity of visual responses, quantified in terms of the entropy of attentional landscapes and the turbulence of scan patterns, especially during speech. We find that perceptual and conceptual guidance mediate the distribution of attention in the scene, whereas structural guidance closely relates to scan pattern complexity. Furthermore, the eye-voice span of the cued object and its perceptual competitor are similar; its latency mediated by both perceptual and structural guidance. These results rule out a strict interpretation of structural guidance as the single dominant form of visual guidance in situated language production. Rather, the phase of the task and the associated demands of cross-modal cognitive processing determine the mechanisms that guide attention.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Thompson, Charles Lamar
This "new English grammar" textbook blends four systems of grammar: (1) the traditional, providing most of the terminology; (2) the historical, providing the historical background; (3) the structural, providing the sentence patterns; and (4) the transformational, providing the variations of the sentence patterns. The author points out the…
Predicting the Unbeaten Path through Syntactic Priming
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Arai, Manabu; Nakamura, Chie; Mazuka, Reiko
2015-01-01
A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in comprehension; following the costly processing of a temporarily ambiguous sentence, comprehenders…
Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers' gender.
Hanulíková, Adriana; Carreiras, Manuel
2015-01-01
An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker's identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker's gender, i.e., the conceptual representation of gender, on subject-verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker's gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker's gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person 'the neighbors were upset because I (∗)stoleMASC plums') elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker's gender, a disagreement between a formally marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM (∗)stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex.
Jouen, A L; Ellmore, T M; Madden, C J; Pallier, C; Dominey, P F; Ventre-Dominey, J
2015-02-01
This research tests the hypothesis that comprehension of human events will engage an extended semantic representation system, independent of the input modality (sentence vs. picture). To investigate this, we examined brain activation and connectivity in 19 subjects who read sentences and viewed pictures depicting everyday events, in a combined fMRI and DTI study. Conjunction of activity in understanding sentences and pictures revealed a common fronto-temporo-parietal network that included the middle and inferior frontal gyri, the parahippocampal-retrosplenial complex, the anterior and middle temporal gyri, the inferior parietal lobe in particular the temporo-parietal cortex. DTI tractography seeded from this temporo-parietal cortex hub revealed a multi-component network reaching into the temporal pole, the ventral frontal pole and premotor cortex. A significant correlation was found between the relative pathway density issued from the temporo-parietal cortex and the imageability of sentences for individual subjects, suggesting a potential functional link between comprehension and the temporo-parietal connectivity strength. These data help to define a "meaning" network that includes components of recently characterized systems for semantic memory, embodied simulation, and visuo-spatial scene representation. The network substantially overlaps with the "default mode" network implicated as part of a core network of semantic representation, along with brain systems related to the formation of mental models, and reasoning. These data are consistent with a model of real-world situational understanding that is highly embodied. Crucially, the neural basis of this embodied understanding is not limited to sensorimotor systems, but extends to the highest levels of cognition, including autobiographical memory, scene analysis, mental model formation, reasoning and theory of mind. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender
Hanulíková, Adriana; Carreiras, Manuel
2015-01-01
An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker’s identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker’s gender, i.e., the conceptual representation of gender, on subject–verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker’s gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker’s gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person ‘the neighbors were upset because I ∗stoleMASC plums’) elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker’s gender, a disagreement between a formally marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM ∗stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex. PMID:26441771
Restrepo, M Adelaida; Castilla, Anny P; Schwanenflugel, Paula J; Neuharth-Pritchett, Stacey; Hamilton, Claire E; Arboleda, Alejandra
2010-01-01
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a supplemental Spanish language instruction program for children who spoke Spanish as their native language and were attending English-only preschool programs. Specifically, the study evaluated the program's effects on the children's Spanish sentence length in words, subordination index, and grammaticality of sentences. Forty-five Spanish-speaking children attending English-only prekindergarten classrooms were selected for study. Of those, 15 children received 30 min of Spanish instruction 5 days a week for 16 weeks. The program targeted 5-10 vocabulary words a week, dialogic book reading, phonemic awareness, and letter knowledge. The remaining 30 children participated in regular preschool English instruction. Students were evaluated before intervention, immediately after intervention, and 4 months following intervention. Repeated measures analyses of variance indicated that the children who received the small-group supplemental Spanish language instruction made significant gains in their Spanish sentence length in words and subordination index when compared to those receiving regular English-only classroom instruction. There were no differences in the children's grammaticality of sentences. The findings demonstrate that a daily short native language program has significant effects on sentence length in words and subordination index in English language learners who are attending English-only preschool programs.
Task-dependent and task-independent neurovascular responses to syntactic processing⋆
Caplan, David; Chen, Evan; Waters, Gloria
2008-01-01
The neural basis for syntactic processing was studied using event-related fMRI to determine the locations of BOLD signal increases in the contrast of syntactically complex sentences with center-embedded, object-extracted relative clauses and syntactically simple sentences with right-branching, subject-extracted relative clauses in a group of 15 participants in three tasks. In a sentence verification task, participants saw a target sentence in one of these two syntactic forms, followed by a probe in a simple active form, and determined whether the probe expressed a proposition in the target. In a plausibility judgment task, participants determined whether a sentence in one of these two syntactic forms was plausible or implausible. Finally, in a non-word detection task, participants determined whether a sentence in one of these two syntactic forms contained only real words or a non-word. BOLD signal associated with the syntactic contrast increased in the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus in non-word detection and in a widespread set of areas in the other two tasks. We conclude that the BOLD activity in the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus reflects syntactic processing independent of concurrent cognitive operations and the more widespread areas of activation reflect the use of strategies and the use of the products of syntactic processing to accomplish tasks. PMID:18387556
Memory Operations and Structures in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Ellipsis
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Martin, Andrea Eyleen
2010-01-01
Natural language often contains dependencies that span words, phrases, or even sentences. Thus, language comprehension relies on recovering recently processed information from memory for subsequent interpretation. This dissertation investigates the memory operations that subserve dependency resolution through the lens of "verb-phrase ellipsis"…
Reconciling Time, Space and Function: A New Dorsal-Ventral Stream Model of Sentence Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina; Schlesewsky, Matthias
2013-01-01
We present a new dorsal-ventral stream framework for language comprehension which unifies basic neurobiological assumptions (Rauschecker & Scott, 2009) with a cross-linguistic neurocognitive sentence comprehension model (eADM; Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006). The dissociation between (time-dependent) syntactic structure-building and…
An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left mid-superior temporal cortex
Frankland, Steven M.; Greene, Joshua D.
2015-01-01
Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of words to compose structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of “bite,” “dog,” and “man,” we can think about a dog biting a man, or a man biting a dog. Here, in two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments using multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA), we identify a region of left mid-superior temporal cortex (lmSTC) that flexibly encodes “who did what to whom” in visually presented sentences. We find that lmSTC represents the current values of abstract semantic variables (“Who did it?” and “To whom was it done?”) in distinct subregions. Experiment 1 first identifies a broad region of lmSTC whose activity patterns (i) facilitate decoding of structure-dependent sentence meaning (“Who did what to whom?”) and (ii) predict affect-related amygdala responses that depend on this information (e.g., “the baby kicked the grandfather” vs. “the grandfather kicked the baby”). Experiment 2 then identifies distinct, but neighboring, subregions of lmSTC whose activity patterns carry information about the identity of the current “agent” (“Who did it?”) and the current “patient” (“To whom was it done?”). These neighboring subregions lie along the upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus and the lateral bank of the superior temporal gyrus, respectively. At a high level, these regions may function like topographically defined data registers, encoding the fluctuating values of abstract semantic variables. This functional architecture, which in key respects resembles that of a classical computer, may play a critical role in enabling humans to flexibly generate complex thoughts. PMID:26305927
Is human sentence parsing serial or parallel? Evidence from event-related brain potentials.
Hopf, Jens-Max; Bader, Markus; Meng, Michael; Bayer, Josef
2003-01-01
In this ERP study we investigate the processes that occur in syntactically ambiguous German sentences at the point of disambiguation. Whereas most psycholinguistic theories agree on the view that processing difficulties arise when parsing preferences are disconfirmed (so-called garden-path effects), important differences exist with respect to theoretical assumptions about the parser's recovery from a misparse. A key distinction can be made between parsers that compute all alternative syntactic structures in parallel (parallel parsers) and parsers that compute only a single preferred analysis (serial parsers). To distinguish empirically between parallel and serial parsing models, we compare ERP responses to garden-path sentences with ERP responses to truly ungrammatical sentences. Garden-path sentences contain a temporary and ultimately curable ungrammaticality, whereas truly ungrammatical sentences remain so permanently--a difference which gives rise to different predictions in the two classes of parsing architectures. At the disambiguating word, ERPs in both sentence types show negative shifts of similar onset latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution in an initial time window between 300 and 500 ms. In a following time window (500-700 ms), the negative shift to garden-path sentences disappears at right central parietal sites, while it continues in permanently ungrammatical sentences. These data are taken as evidence for a strictly serial parser. The absence of a difference in the early time window indicates that temporary and permanent ungrammaticalities trigger the same kind of parsing responses. Later differences can be related to successful reanalysis in garden-path but not in ungrammatical sentences. Copyright 2003 Elsevier Science B.V.
Caplan, David; Michaud, Jennifer; Hufford, Rebecca
2013-10-01
Sixty-one pwa were tested on syntactic comprehension in three tasks: sentence-picture matching, sentence-picture matching with auditory moving window presentation, and object manipulation. There were significant correlations of performances on sentences across tasks. First factors on which all sentence types loaded in unrotated factor analyses accounted for most of the variance in each task. Dissociations in performance between sentence types that differed minimally in their syntactic structures were not consistent across tasks. These results replicate previous results with smaller samples and provide important validation of basic aspects of aphasic performance in this area of language processing. They point to the role of a reduction in processing resources and of the interaction of task demands and parsing and interpretive abilities in the genesis of patient performance. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
A Method for Extracting Important Segments from Documents Using Support Vector Machines
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Suzuki, Daisuke; Utsumi, Akira
In this paper we propose an extraction-based method for automatic summarization. The proposed method consists of two processes: important segment extraction and sentence compaction. The process of important segment extraction classifies each segment in a document as important or not by Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The process of sentence compaction then determines grammatically appropriate portions of a sentence for a summary according to its dependency structure and the classification result by SVMs. To test the performance of our method, we conducted an evaluation experiment using the Text Summarization Challenge (TSC-1) corpus of human-prepared summaries. The result was that our method achieved better performance than a segment-extraction-only method and the Lead method, especially for sentences only a part of which was included in human summaries. Further analysis of the experimental results suggests that a hybrid method that integrates sentence extraction with segment extraction may generate better summaries.
An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection.
Newman, Aaron J; Ullman, Michael T; Pancheva, Roumyana; Waligura, Diane L; Neville, Helen J
2007-01-01
Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs ("regulars") is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, "irregular" English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over midline parietal sites (P600s), and seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory.
Adjective Identification in Television Advertisements
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Abd Rahim, Normaliza
2013-01-01
Learning the Malay language has been a challenging task for foreign language learners. Learners have to learn Malay grammar structure rules in order to write simple sentences. The word choice is important in constructing a sentence. Therefore, the study focuses on the use of adjectives in television advertisements among Korean learners at Hankuk…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Weighall, Anna R.
2008-01-01
Research with adults has shown that ambiguous spoken sentences are resolved efficiently, exploiting multiple cues--including referential context--to select the intended meaning. Paradoxically, children appear to be insensitive to referential cues when resolving ambiguous sentences, relying instead on statistical properties intrinsic to the…
The Indicative and Subjunctive "da"-complements in Serbian A Syntactic-Semantic Approach
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Todorovic, Natasa
2012-01-01
A syntactic-semantic investigation of subjunctive and indicative "da"-complements in Serbian is conducted in this project. After a careful comparison of Serbian sentence constructions with "da"-complements to the equivalent sentence structures in languages of the Balkans as well as other Slavic languages, it is clearly…
Syntactic learning by mere exposure - An ERP study in adult learners
Mueller, Jutta L; Oberecker, Regine; Friederici, Angela D
2009-01-01
Background Artificial language studies have revealed the remarkable ability of humans to extract syntactic structures from a continuous sound stream by mere exposure. However, it remains unclear whether the processes acquired in such tasks are comparable to those applied during normal language processing. The present study compares the ERPs to auditory processing of simple Italian sentences in native and non-native speakers after brief exposure to Italian sentences of a similar structure. The sentences contained a non-adjacent dependency between an auxiliary and the morphologically marked suffix of the verb. Participants were presented four alternating learning and testing phases. During learning phases only correct sentences were presented while during testing phases 50 percent of the sentences contained a grammatical violation. Results The non-native speakers successfully learned the dependency and displayed an N400-like negativity and a subsequent anteriorily distributed positivity in response to rule violations. The native Italian group showed an N400 followed by a P600 effect. Conclusion The presence of the P600 suggests that native speakers applied a grammatical rule. In contrast, non-native speakers appeared to use a lexical form-based processing strategy. Thus, the processing mechanisms acquired in the language learning task were only partly comparable to those applied by competent native speakers. PMID:19640301
Syntactic learning by mere exposure--an ERP study in adult learners.
Mueller, Jutta L; Oberecker, Regine; Friederici, Angela D
2009-07-29
Artificial language studies have revealed the remarkable ability of humans to extract syntactic structures from a continuous sound stream by mere exposure. However, it remains unclear whether the processes acquired in such tasks are comparable to those applied during normal language processing. The present study compares the ERPs to auditory processing of simple Italian sentences in native and non-native speakers after brief exposure to Italian sentences of a similar structure. The sentences contained a non-adjacent dependency between an auxiliary and the morphologically marked suffix of the verb. Participants were presented four alternating learning and testing phases. During learning phases only correct sentences were presented while during testing phases 50 percent of the sentences contained a grammatical violation. The non-native speakers successfully learned the dependency and displayed an N400-like negativity and a subsequent anteriorily distributed positivity in response to rule violations. The native Italian group showed an N400 followed by a P600 effect. The presence of the P600 suggests that native speakers applied a grammatical rule. In contrast, non-native speakers appeared to use a lexical form-based processing strategy. Thus, the processing mechanisms acquired in the language learning task were only partly comparable to those applied by competent native speakers.
Unsupervised learning of natural languages
Solan, Zach; Horn, David; Ruppin, Eytan; Edelman, Shimon
2005-01-01
We address the problem, fundamental to linguistics, bioinformatics, and certain other disciplines, of using corpora of raw symbolic sequential data to infer underlying rules that govern their production. Given a corpus of strings (such as text, transcribed speech, chromosome or protein sequence data, sheet music, etc.), our unsupervised algorithm recursively distills from it hierarchically structured patterns. The adios (automatic distillation of structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, and on protein data correlating sequence with function. This unsupervised algorithm is capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics. PMID:16087885
Unsupervised learning of natural languages.
Solan, Zach; Horn, David; Ruppin, Eytan; Edelman, Shimon
2005-08-16
We address the problem, fundamental to linguistics, bioinformatics, and certain other disciplines, of using corpora of raw symbolic sequential data to infer underlying rules that govern their production. Given a corpus of strings (such as text, transcribed speech, chromosome or protein sequence data, sheet music, etc.), our unsupervised algorithm recursively distills from it hierarchically structured patterns. The adios (automatic distillation of structure) algorithm relies on a statistical method for pattern extraction and on structured generalization, two processes that have been implicated in language acquisition. It has been evaluated on artificial context-free grammars with thousands of rules, on natural languages as diverse as English and Chinese, and on protein data correlating sequence with function. This unsupervised algorithm is capable of learning complex syntax, generating grammatical novel sentences, and proving useful in other fields that call for structure discovery from raw data, such as bioinformatics.
Malfait, D; Tucholka, A; Mendizabal, S; Tremblay, J; Poulin, C; Oskoui, M; Srour, M; Carmant, L; Major, P; Lippé, S
2015-11-01
Children with benign epilepsy with centro-temporal spikes (BECTS) often have language problems. Abnormal epileptic activity is found in central and temporal brain regions, which are involved in reading and semantic and syntactic comprehension. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined reading networks in BECTS children with a new sentence reading comprehension task involving semantic and syntactic processing. Fifteen children with BECTS (age=11y 1m ± 16 m; 12 boys) and 18 healthy controls (age=11 y 8m ± 20 m; 11 boys) performed an fMRI reading comprehension task in which they read a pair of syntactically complex sentences and decided whether the target sentence (the second sentence in the pair) was true or false with respect to the first sentence. All children also underwent an exhaustive neuropsychological assessment. We demonstrated weaknesses in several cognitive domains in BECTS children. During the sentence reading fMRI task, left inferior frontal regions and bilateral temporal areas were activated in BECTS children and healthy controls. However, additional brain regions such as the left hippocampus and precuneus were activated in BECTS children. Moreover, specific activation was found in the left caudate and putamen in BECTS children but not in healthy controls. Cognitive results and accuracy during the fMRI task were associated with specific brain activation patterns. BECTS children recruited a wider network to perform the fMRI sentence reading comprehension task, with specific activation in the left dorsal striatum. BECTS cognitive performance differently predicted functional activation in frontal and temporal regions compared to controls, suggesting differences in brain network organisation that contribute to reading comprehension. Crown Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Knoll, L J; Obleser, J; Schipke, C S; Friederici, A D; Brauer, J
2012-08-01
Children's language skills develop rapidly with increasing age, and several studies indicate that they use language- and age-specific strategies to understand complex sentences. In the present experiment, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral measures were used to investigate the acquisition of case-marking cues for sentence interpretation in the developing brain of German preschool children with a mean age of 6 years. Short sentences were presented auditorily, consisting of a transitive verb and two case-marked arguments with canonical subject-initial or non canonical object-initial word order. Overall group results revealed mainly left hemispheric activation in the perisylvian cortex with increased activation in the inferior parietal cortex (IPC), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) for object-initial compared to subject-initial sentences. However, single-subject analysis suggested two distinct activation patterns within the group which allowed a classification into two subgroups. One subgroup showed the predicted activation increase in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) for the more difficult object-initial compared to subject-initial sentences, while the other group showed the reverse effect. This activation in the left IFG can be taken to reflect the degree to which adult-like sentence processing strategies, necessary to integrate case-marking information, are applied. Additional behavioral data on language development tests show that these two subgroups differ in their grammatical knowledge. Together with these behavioral findings, the results indicate that the use of a particular processing strategy is not dependent on age as such, but rather on the child's individual grammatical knowledge and the ability to use specific language cues for successful sentence comprehension. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproducing American Sign Language sentences: cognitive scaffolding in working memory
Supalla, Ted; Hauser, Peter C.; Bavelier, Daphne
2014-01-01
The American Sign Language Sentence Reproduction Test (ASL-SRT) requires the precise reproduction of a series of ASL sentences increasing in complexity and length. Error analyses of such tasks provides insight into working memory and scaffolding processes. Data was collected from three groups expected to differ in fluency: deaf children, deaf adults and hearing adults, all users of ASL. Quantitative (correct/incorrect recall) and qualitative error analyses were performed. Percent correct on the reproduction task supports its sensitivity to fluency as test performance clearly differed across the three groups studied. A linguistic analysis of errors further documented differing strategies and bias across groups. Subjects' recall projected the affordance and constraints of deep linguistic representations to differing degrees, with subjects resorting to alternate processing strategies when they failed to recall the sentence correctly. A qualitative error analysis allows us to capture generalizations about the relationship between error pattern and the cognitive scaffolding, which governs the sentence reproduction process. Highly fluent signers and less-fluent signers share common chokepoints on particular words in sentences. However, they diverge in heuristic strategy. Fluent signers, when they make an error, tend to preserve semantic details while altering morpho-syntactic domains. They produce syntactically correct sentences with equivalent meaning to the to-be-reproduced one, but these are not verbatim reproductions of the original sentence. In contrast, less-fluent signers tend to use a more linear strategy, preserving lexical status and word ordering while omitting local inflections, and occasionally resorting to visuo-motoric imitation. Thus, whereas fluent signers readily use top-down scaffolding in their working memory, less fluent signers fail to do so. Implications for current models of working memory across spoken and signed modalities are considered. PMID:25152744
To, Carol K S; Lui, Hoi Ming; Li, Xin Xin; Lam, Gary Y H
2015-08-01
In this study, we aimed to evaluate the efficacy of sentence-combining (SC) and narrative-based (NAR) intervention approaches to syntax intervention using a randomized-controlled-trial design. Fifty-two Cantonese-speaking, school-age children with language impairment were assigned randomly to either the SC or the NAR treatment arm. Seven children did not receive treatment as assigned. Intervention in both arms targeted the same complex syntactical structures. The SC group focused on sentence combination training, whereas the NAR group made use of narratives in which the target structures were embedded. Pretest and posttest performances measured using a standardized language assessment were subjected to analyses of covariance mixed-effect-model analyses of variance. Children in both treatment arms demonstrated significant growth after 4 months of intervention. The main effect between treatment arms and time was not significant after controlling the pretest performance, suggesting that both treatment approaches showed similar effects. The main effect of time was significant. This study provided evidence to support language intervention in the school years in Cantonese-speaking children. However, neither approach was shown to be more efficacious than the other. Future researchers could examine the effects of a longer treatment period and include functional outcome measures.
Szalisznyó, Krisztina; Silverstein, David; Teichmann, Marc; Duffau, Hugues; Smits, Anja
2017-01-01
A growing body of literature supports a key role of fronto-striatal circuits in language perception. It is now known that the striatum plays a role in engaging attentional resources and linguistic rule computation while also serving phonological short-term memory capabilities. The ventral semantic and the dorsal phonological stream dichotomy assumed for spoken language processing also seems to play a role in cortico-striatal perception. Based on recent studies that correlate deep Broca-striatal pathways with complex syntax performance, we used a previously developed computational model of frontal-striatal syntax circuits and hypothesized that different parallel language pathways may contribute to canonical and non-canonical sentence comprehension separately. We modified and further analyzed a thematic role assignment task and corresponding reservoir computing model of language circuits, as previously developed by Dominey and coworkers. We examined the models performance under various parameter regimes, by influencing how fast the presented language input decays and altering the temporal dynamics of activated word representations. This enabled us to quantify canonical and non-canonical sentence comprehension abilities. The modeling results suggest that separate cortico-cortical and cortico-striatal circuits may be recruited differently for processing syntactically more difficult and less complicated sentences. Alternatively, a single circuit would need to dynamically and adaptively adjust to syntactic complexity. Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Inc.
Implicit Detection of Poetic Harmony by the Naïve Brain.
Vaughan-Evans, Awel; Trefor, Robat; Jones, Llion; Lynch, Peredur; Jones, Manon W; Thierry, Guillaume
2016-01-01
The power of poetry is universally acknowledged, but it is debatable whether its appreciation is reserved for experts. Here, we show that readers with no particular knowledge of a traditional form of Welsh poetry unconsciously distinguish phrases conforming to its complex poetic construction rules from those that violate them. We studied the brain response of native speakers of Welsh as they read meaningful sentences ending in a word that either complied with strict poetic construction rules, violated rules of consonantal repetition, violated stress pattern, or violated both these constraints. Upon reading the last word of each sentence, participants indicated sentence acceptability. As expected, our inexperienced participants did not explicitly distinguish between sentences that conformed to the poetic rules from those that violated them. However, in the case of orthodox sentences, the critical word elicited a distinctive brain response characteristic of target detection -the P3b- as compared to the other conditions, showing that speakers of Welsh with no expertise of this particular form of poetry implicitly detect poetic harmony. These results show for the first time that before we even consider literal meaning, the musical properties of poetry speak to the human mind in ways that escape consciousness.
Implicit Detection of Poetic Harmony by the Naïve Brain
Vaughan-Evans, Awel; Trefor, Robat; Jones, Llion; Lynch, Peredur; Jones, Manon W.; Thierry, Guillaume
2016-01-01
The power of poetry is universally acknowledged, but it is debatable whether its appreciation is reserved for experts. Here, we show that readers with no particular knowledge of a traditional form of Welsh poetry unconsciously distinguish phrases conforming to its complex poetic construction rules from those that violate them. We studied the brain response of native speakers of Welsh as they read meaningful sentences ending in a word that either complied with strict poetic construction rules, violated rules of consonantal repetition, violated stress pattern, or violated both these constraints. Upon reading the last word of each sentence, participants indicated sentence acceptability. As expected, our inexperienced participants did not explicitly distinguish between sentences that conformed to the poetic rules from those that violated them. However, in the case of orthodox sentences, the critical word elicited a distinctive brain response characteristic of target detection –the P3b– as compared to the other conditions, showing that speakers of Welsh with no expertise of this particular form of poetry implicitly detect poetic harmony. These results show for the first time that before we even consider literal meaning, the musical properties of poetry speak to the human mind in ways that escape consciousness. PMID:27933025
Xu, Hua; AbdelRahman, Samir; Lu, Yanxin; Denny, Joshua C.; Doan, Son
2011-01-01
Semantic-based sublanguage grammars have been shown to be an efficient method for medical language processing. However, given the complexity of the medical domain, parsers using such grammars inevitably encounter ambiguous sentences, which could be interpreted by different groups of production rules and consequently result in two or more parse trees. One possible solution, which has not been extensively explored previously, is to augment productions in medical sublanguage grammars with probabilities to resolve the ambiguity. In this study, we associated probabilities with production rules in a semantic-based grammar for medication findings and evaluated its performance on reducing parsing ambiguity. Using the existing data set from 2009 i2b2 NLP (Natural Language Processing) challenge for medication extraction, we developed a semantic-based CFG (Context Free Grammar) for parsing medication sentences and manually created a Treebank of 4,564 medication sentences from discharge summaries. Using the Treebank, we derived a semantic-based PCFG (probabilistic Context Free Grammar) for parsing medication sentences. Our evaluation using a 10-fold cross validation showed that the PCFG parser dramatically improved parsing performance when compared to the CFG parser. PMID:21856440
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Li, Ji; Ren, Fuji
Weblogs have greatly changed the communication ways of mankind. Affective analysis of blog posts is found valuable for many applications such as text-to-speech synthesis or computer-assisted recommendation. Traditional emotion recognition in text based on single-label classification can not satisfy higher requirements of affective computing. In this paper, the automatic identification of sentence emotion in weblogs is modeled as a multi-label text categorization task. Experiments are carried out on 12273 blog sentences from the Chinese emotion corpus Ren_CECps with 8-dimension emotion annotation. An ensemble algorithm RAKEL is used to recognize dominant emotions from the writer's perspective. Our emotion feature using detailed intensity representation for word emotions outperforms the other main features such as the word frequency feature and the traditional lexicon-based feature. In order to deal with relatively complex sentences, we integrate grammatical characteristics of punctuations, disjunctive connectives, modification relations and negation into features. It achieves 13.51% and 12.49% increases for Micro-averaged F1 and Macro-averaged F1 respectively compared to the traditional lexicon-based feature. Result shows that multiple-dimension emotion representation with grammatical features can efficiently classify sentence emotion in a multi-label problem.
How Fuzzy-Trace Theory Predicts True and False Memories for Words, Sentences, and Narratives
Reyna, Valerie F.; Corbin, Jonathan C.; Weldon, Rebecca B.; Brainerd, Charles J.
2016-01-01
Fuzzy-trace theory posits independent verbatim and gist memory processes, a distinction that has implications for such applied topics as eyewitness testimony. This distinction between precise, literal verbatim memory and meaning-based, intuitive gist accounts for memory paradoxes including dissociations between true and false memory, false memories outlasting true memories, and developmental increases in false memory. We provide an overview of fuzzy-trace theory, and, using mathematical modeling, also present results demonstrating verbatim and gist memory in true and false recognition of narrative sentences and inferences. Results supported fuzzy-trace theory's dual-process view of memory: verbatim memory was relied on to reject meaning-consistent, but unpresented, sentences (via recollection rejection). However, verbatim memory was often not retrieved, and gist memory supported acceptance of these sentences (via similarity judgment and phantom recollection). Thus, mathematical models of words can be extended to explain memory for complex stimuli, such as narratives, the kind of memory interrogated in law. PMID:27042402
Preschoolers Use Phrasal Prosody Online to Constrain Syntactic Analysis
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
de Carvalho, Alex; Dautriche, Isabelle; Christophe, Anne
2016-01-01
Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences (["la petite 'ferme'"] ["est très jolie"] "the small farm is very…
The Processing of Extraposed Structures in English
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Levy, Roger; Fedorenko, Evelina; Breen, Mara; Gibson, Edward
2012-01-01
In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more…
The Foundations of Linguistics: Two Theses
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Barrios, Edison
2009-01-01
Linguists tell us that the sentence "I enjoyed yourself" is ungrammatical because it violates structural constraints on English sentences. Is this a fact about the "psychology" of English speakers, or a fact about some "mind-independent" state of affairs? If it is indeed a fact about the speaker's psychological makeup then is it so in virtue of…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
McConky, Katie Theresa
2013-01-01
This work covers topics in event coreference and event classification from spoken conversation. Event coreference is the process of identifying descriptions of the same event across sentences, documents, or structured databases. Existing event coreference work focuses on sentence similarity models or feature based similarity models requiring slot…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Zhou, Xiaolin; Jiang, Xiaoming; Ye, Zheng; Zhang, Yaxu; Lou, Kaiyang; Zhan, Weidong
2010-01-01
An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of semantic integration processes at different levels of syntactic hierarchy during Chinese sentence reading. In a hierarchical structure, "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral" + "classifier" + "object noun," the object noun is constrained by selectional…
The Effects of Tense Continuity and Subject-Verb Agreement Errors on Communication.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Porton, Vicki M.
This study explored the dichotomy between global errors, that is, those violating rules of overall sentence structure, and local errors, that is, those violating rules within a particular constituent of a sentence, and the relationship of these to communication breakdown. The focus was tense continuity across clauses (TC) and subject-verb…
Future Expectations of Brasilian Street Youth
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Raffaelli, M.; Koller, S.H.
2005-01-01
Future expectations of youth surviving on the streets of Porto Alegre, Brasil, were examined. The sample consisted of 35 boys and 34 girls aged 10-18 (M age 14.4) who participated in a sentence completion task and semi-structured interviews. Responses to two incomplete sentences regarding the future revealed a mismatch between hoped-for and…
Comparison of Measures of Morphosyntactic Complexity in French-Speaking School-Aged Children
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Mimeau, Catherine; Plourde, Vickie; Ouellet, Andrée-Anne; Dionne, Ginette
2015-01-01
This study examined the validity and reliability of different measures of morphosyntactic complexity, including the Morphosyntactic Complexity Scale (MSCS), a novel adaptation of the Developmental Sentence Scoring, in French-speaking school-aged children. Seventy-three Quebec children from kindergarten to Grade 3 completed a definition task and a…
Shi, Lu-Feng; Koenig, Laura L
2016-01-01
Non-native listeners do not recognize English sentences as effectively as native listeners, especially in noise. It is not entirely clear to what extent such group differences arise from differences in relative weight of semantic versus syntactic cues. This study quantified the use and weighting of these contextual cues via Boothroyd and Nittrouer's j and k factors. The j represents the probability of recognizing sentences with or without context, whereas the k represents the degree to which context improves recognition performance. Four groups of 13 normal-hearing young adult listeners participated. One group consisted of native English monolingual (EMN) listeners, whereas the other three consisted of non-native listeners contrasting in their language dominance and first language: English-dominant Russian-English, Russian-dominant Russian-English, and Spanish-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. All listeners were presented three sets of four-word sentences: high-predictability sentences included both semantic and syntactic cues, low-predictability sentences included syntactic cues only, and zero-predictability sentences included neither semantic nor syntactic cues. Sentences were presented at 65 dB SPL binaurally in the presence of speech-spectrum noise at +3 dB SNR. Listeners orally repeated each sentence and recognition was calculated for individual words as well as the sentence as a whole. Comparable j values across groups for high-predictability, low-predictability, and zero-predictability sentences suggested that all listeners, native and non-native, utilized contextual cues to recognize English sentences. Analysis of the k factor indicated that non-native listeners took advantage of syntax as effectively as EMN listeners. However, only English-dominant bilinguals utilized semantics to the same extent as EMN listeners; semantics did not provide a significant benefit for the two non-English-dominant groups. When combined, semantics and syntax benefitted EMN listeners significantly more than all three non-native groups of listeners. Language background influenced the use and weighting of semantic and syntactic cues in a complex manner. A native language advantage existed in the effective use of both cues combined. A language-dominance effect was seen in the use of semantics. No first-language effect was present for the use of either or both cues. For all non-native listeners, syntax contributed significantly more to sentence recognition than semantics, possibly due to the fact that semantics develops more gradually than syntax in second-language acquisition. The present study provides evidence that Boothroyd and Nittrouer's j and k factors can be successfully used to quantify the effectiveness of contextual cue use in clinically relevant, linguistically diverse populations.
Short Term Memory, Working Memory, and Syntactic Comprehension in Aphasia
Caplan, David; Michaud, Jennifer; Hufford, Rebecca
2013-01-01
Sixty one people with aphasia were tested on ten tests of short term memory (STM) and for the ability to use syntactic structure to determine the meanings of eleven types of sentences in three tasks – object manipulation, picture matching and picture matching with self-paced listening. Multilevel models showed relationships between measures of the ability to retain and manipulate item and order information in STM and accuracy and RT, and a greater relationship between these STM measures and accuracy and RT for several more complex sentence types in individual tasks. There were no effects of measures of STM that reflect the use of phonological codes or rehearsal on comprehension. There was only one effect of STM measures on self-paced listening times. There were double dissociations between performance on STM and individual comprehension tasks, indicating that normal STM is not necessary to perform normally on these tasks. The results are most easily related to the view that STM plays a facilitatory role in supporting the use of the products of the comprehension process to accomplish operations related to tasks. PMID:23865692
Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface-to-Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs
Dautriche, Isabelle; Cristia, Alejandrina; Brusini, Perrine; Yuan, Sylvia; Fisher, Cynthia; Christophe, Anne
2013-01-01
Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning which do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds’ interpretation of right-dislocated sentences (nouni-verb, nouni) where the presence of clear, language-specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as transitive, disregarding prosodic cues to dislocation (Experiment 1) but correctly interpreted right-dislocated sentences containing well-known verbs (Experiment 2). These results suggest that toddlers can integrate multiple cues in ideal conditions, but default to canonical surface-to-meaning mapping when extracting structural information about novel verbs in semantically impoverished conditions. PMID:24117408
Stepanov, Arthur; Pavlič, Matic; Stateva, Penka; Reboul, Anne
2018-01-01
This study investigated whether early bilingualism and early musical training positively influence the ability to discriminate between prosodic patterns corresponding to different syntactic structures in otherwise phonetically identical sentences in an unknown language. In a same-different discrimination task, participants (N = 108) divided into four groups (monolingual non-musicians, monolingual musicians, bilingual non-musicians, and bilingual musicians) listened to pairs of short sentences in a language unknown to them (French). In discriminating phonetically identical but prosodically different sentences, musicians, bilinguals, and bilingual musicians outperformed the controls. However, there was no interaction between bilingualism and musical training to suggest an additive effect. These results underscore the significant role of both types of experience in enhancing the listeners' sensitivity to prosodic information.
Amichetti, Nicole M; White, Alison G; Wingfield, Arthur
2016-01-01
A fundamental question in psycholinguistic theory is whether equivalent success in sentence comprehension may come about by different underlying operations. Of special interest is whether adult aging, especially when accompanied by reduced hearing acuity, may shift the balance of reliance on formal syntax vs. plausibility in determining sentence meaning. In two experiments participants were asked to identify the thematic roles in grammatical sentences that contained either plausible or implausible semantic relations. Comprehension of sentence meanings was indexed by the ability to correctly name the agent or the recipient of an action represented in the sentence. In Experiment 1 young and older adults' comprehension was tested for plausible and implausible sentences with the meaning expressed with either an active-declarative or a passive syntactic form. In Experiment 2 comprehension performance was examined for young adults with age-normal hearing, older adults with good hearing acuity, and age-matched older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss for plausible or implausible sentences with meaning expressed with either a subject-relative (SR) or an object-relative (OR) syntactic structure. Experiment 1 showed that the likelihood of interpreting a sentence according to its literal meaning was reduced when that meaning expressed an implausible relationship. Experiment 2 showed that this likelihood was further decreased for OR as compared to SR sentences, and especially so for older adults whose hearing impairment added to the perceptual challenge. Experiment 2 also showed that working memory capacity as measured with a letter-number sequencing task contributed to the likelihood that listeners would base their comprehension responses on the literal syntax even when this processing scheme yielded an implausible meaning. Taken together, the results of both experiments support the postulate that listeners may use more than a single uniform processing strategy for successful sentence comprehension, with the existence of these alternative solutions only revealed when literal syntax and plausibility do not coincide.
Amichetti, Nicole M.; White, Alison G.; Wingfield, Arthur
2016-01-01
A fundamental question in psycholinguistic theory is whether equivalent success in sentence comprehension may come about by different underlying operations. Of special interest is whether adult aging, especially when accompanied by reduced hearing acuity, may shift the balance of reliance on formal syntax vs. plausibility in determining sentence meaning. In two experiments participants were asked to identify the thematic roles in grammatical sentences that contained either plausible or implausible semantic relations. Comprehension of sentence meanings was indexed by the ability to correctly name the agent or the recipient of an action represented in the sentence. In Experiment 1 young and older adults’ comprehension was tested for plausible and implausible sentences with the meaning expressed with either an active-declarative or a passive syntactic form. In Experiment 2 comprehension performance was examined for young adults with age-normal hearing, older adults with good hearing acuity, and age-matched older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss for plausible or implausible sentences with meaning expressed with either a subject-relative (SR) or an object-relative (OR) syntactic structure. Experiment 1 showed that the likelihood of interpreting a sentence according to its literal meaning was reduced when that meaning expressed an implausible relationship. Experiment 2 showed that this likelihood was further decreased for OR as compared to SR sentences, and especially so for older adults whose hearing impairment added to the perceptual challenge. Experiment 2 also showed that working memory capacity as measured with a letter-number sequencing task contributed to the likelihood that listeners would base their comprehension responses on the literal syntax even when this processing scheme yielded an implausible meaning. Taken together, the results of both experiments support the postulate that listeners may use more than a single uniform processing strategy for successful sentence comprehension, with the existence of these alternative solutions only revealed when literal syntax and plausibility do not coincide. PMID:27303346
Saying what’s on your mind: Working memory effects on sentence production
Slevc, L. Robert
2011-01-01
The role of working memory (WM) in sentence comprehension has received considerable interest, but little work has investigated how sentence production relies on memory mechanisms. These three experiments investigated speakers’ tendency to produce syntactic structures that allow for early production of material that is accessible in memory. In Experiment 1, speakers produced accessible information early less often when under a verbal WM load than when under no load. Experiment 2 found the same pattern for given-new ordering, i.e., when accessibility was manipulated by making information given. Experiment 3 addressed the possibility that these effects do not reflect WM mechanisms but rather increased task difficulty by relying on the distinction between verbal and spatial WM: Speakers’ tendency to produce sentences respecting given-new ordering was reduced more by a verbal than by a spatial WM load. These patterns show that accessibility effects do in fact reflect accessibility in verbal WM, and that representations in sentence production are vulnerable to interference from other information in memory. PMID:21767058
Zeng, Tao; Mao, Wen; Lu, Qing
2016-05-25
Scalp-recorded event-related potentials are known to be sensitive to particular aspects of sentence processing. The N400 component is widely recognized as an effect closely related to lexical-semantic processing. The absence of an N400 effect in participants performing tasks in Indo-European languages has been considered evidence that failed syntactic category processing appears to block lexical-semantic integration and that syntactic structure building is a prerequisite of semantic analysis. An event-related potential experiment was designed to investigate whether such syntactic primacy can be considered to apply equally to Chinese sentence processing. Besides correct middles, sentences with either single semantic or single syntactic violation as well as double syntactic and semantic anomaly were used in the present research. Results showed that both purely semantic and combined violation induced a broad negativity in the time window 300-500 ms, indicating the independence of lexical-semantic integration. These findings provided solid evidence that lexical-semantic parsing plays a crucial role in Chinese sentence comprehension.
Interpreting Quantifier Scope Ambiguity: Evidence of Heuristic First, Algorithmic Second Processing
Dwivedi, Veena D.
2013-01-01
The present work suggests that sentence processing requires both heuristic and algorithmic processing streams, where the heuristic processing strategy precedes the algorithmic phase. This conclusion is based on three self-paced reading experiments in which the processing of two-sentence discourses was investigated, where context sentences exhibited quantifier scope ambiguity. Experiment 1 demonstrates that such sentences are processed in a shallow manner. Experiment 2 uses the same stimuli as Experiment 1 but adds questions to ensure deeper processing. Results indicate that reading times are consistent with a lexical-pragmatic interpretation of number associated with context sentences, but responses to questions are consistent with the algorithmic computation of quantifier scope. Experiment 3 shows the same pattern of results as Experiment 2, despite using stimuli with different lexical-pragmatic biases. These effects suggest that language processing can be superficial, and that deeper processing, which is sensitive to structure, only occurs if required. Implications for recent studies of quantifier scope ambiguity are discussed. PMID:24278439
A Cognitive Complexity Metric Applied to Cognitive Development
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Andrews, Glenda; Halford, Graeme S.
2002-01-01
Two experiments tested predictions from a theory in which processing load depends on relational complexity (RC), the number of variables related in a single decision. Tasks from six domains (transitivity, hierarchical classification, class inclusion, cardinality, relative-clause sentence comprehension, and hypothesis testing) were administered to…
Kielar, Aneta; Meltzer-Asscher, Aya; Thompson, Cynthia
2012-01-01
Sentence comprehension requires processing of argument structure information associated with verbs, i.e. the number and type of arguments that they select. Many individuals with agrammatic aphasia show impaired production of verbs with greater argument structure density. The extent to which these participants also show argument structure deficits during comprehension, however, is unclear. Some studies find normal access to verb arguments, whereas others report impaired ability. The present study investigated verb argument structure processing in agrammatic aphasia by examining event-related potentials associated with argument structure violations in healthy young and older adults as well as aphasic individuals. A semantic violation condition was included to investigate possible differences in sensitivity to semantic and argument structure information during sentence processing. Results for the healthy control participants showed a negativity followed by a positive shift (N400-P600) in the argument structure violation condition, as found in previous ERP studies (Friederici & Frisch, 2000; Frisch, Hahne, & Friederici, 2004). In contrast, individuals with agrammatic aphasia showed a P600, but no N400, response to argument structure mismatches. Additionally, compared to the control groups, the agrammatic participants showed an attenuated, but relatively preserved, N400 response to semantic violations. These data show that agrammatic individuals do not demonstrate normal real-time sensitivity to verb argument structure requirements during sentence processing. PMID:23022079
New and updated tests of print exposure and reading abilities in college students
Acheson, Daniel J.; Wells, Justine B.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.
2010-01-01
The relationship between print exposure and measures of reading skill was examined in college students (N = 99, 58 female; mean age = 20.3 years). Print exposure was measured with several new self-reports of reading and writing habits, as well as updated versions of the Author Recognition Test and the Magazine Recognition Test (Stanovich & West, 1989). Participants completed a sentence comprehension task with syntactically complex sentences, and reading times and comprehension accuracy were measured. An additional measure of reading skill was provided by participants’ scores on the verbal portions of the ACT, a standardized achievement test. Higher levels of print exposure were associated with higher sentence processing abilities and superior verbal ACT performance. The relative merits of different print exposure assessments are discussed. PMID:18411551
VERBAL AND SPATIAL WORKING MEMORY LOAD HAVE SIMILARLY MINIMAL EFFECTS ON SPEECH PRODUCTION.
Lee, Ogyoung; Redford, Melissa A
2015-08-10
The goal of the present study was to test the effects of working memory on speech production. Twenty American-English speaking adults produced syntactically complex sentences in tasks that taxed either verbal or spatial working memory. Sentences spoken under load were produced with more errors, fewer prosodic breaks, and at faster rates than sentence produced in the control conditions, but other acoustic correlates of rhythm and intonation did not change. Verbal and spatial working memory had very similar effects on production, suggesting that the different span tasks used to tax working memory merely shifted speakers' attention away from the act of speaking. This finding runs contra the hypothesis of incremental phonological/phonetic encoding, which predicts the manipulation of information in verbal working memory during speech production.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Yan, Ming; Kliegl, Reinhold
2016-01-01
As a contribution to a theoretical debate about the degree of high-level influences on saccade targeting during sentence reading, we investigated eye movements during the reading of structurally ambiguous Chinese character strings and examined whether parafoveal word segmentation could influence saccade-target selection. As expected, ambiguous…
An Approach for Embedding Critical Thinking in Second Language Paragraph Writing
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Chason, Lisa; Loyet, Dianne; Sorenson, Luann; Stoops, Anastasia
2017-01-01
Writing textbooks for English language learners frequently teach a paragraph pattern that is limited to topic sentence, support, and concluding sentence. Although beginning second language (L2) writers benefit from having a structured way to organize their ideas, as they advance, this type of writing can sound trite and uncritical. To provide a…
The Role of Working Memory and Contextual Constraints in Children's Processing of Relative Clauses
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Wieghall, Anna R.; Altmann, Gerry T. M.
2011-01-01
An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking six- to eight-year-old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the…
Attention and Memory Play Different Roles in Syntactic Choice during Sentence Production
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Myachykov, Andriy; Garrod, Simon; Scheepers, Christoph
2018-01-01
Attentional control of referential information is an important contributor to the structure of discourse. We investigated how attention and memory interplay during visually situated sentence production. We manipulated speakers' attention to the agent or the patient of a described event by means of a referential or a dot visual cue. We also…
Semantic Evaluation of Syntactic Structure: Evidence from Eye Movements
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Frazier, Lyn; Carminati, Maria Nella; Cook, Anne E.; Majewski, Helen; Rayner, Keith
2006-01-01
An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…
Sauppe, Sebastian
2016-01-01
Studies on anticipatory processes during sentence comprehension often focus on the prediction of postverbal direct objects. In subject-initial languages (the target of most studies so far), however, the position in the sentence, the syntactic function, and the semantic role of arguments are often conflated. For example, in the sentence "The frog will eat the fly" the syntactic object ("fly") is at the same time also the last word and the patient argument of the verb. It is therefore not apparent which kind of information listeners orient to for predictive processing during sentence comprehension. A visual world eye tracking study on the verb-initial language Tagalog (Austronesian) tested what kind of information listeners use to anticipate upcoming postverbal linguistic input. The grammatical structure of Tagalog allows to test whether listeners' anticipatory gaze behavior is guided by predictions of the linear order of words, by syntactic functions (e.g., subject/object), or by semantic roles (agent/patient). Participants heard sentences of the type "Eat frog fly" or "Eat fly frog" (both meaning "The frog will eat the fly") while looking at displays containing an agent referent ("frog"), a patient referent ("fly") and a distractor. The verb carried morphological marking that allowed the order and syntactic function of agent and patient to be inferred. After having heard the verb, listeners fixated on the agent irrespective of its syntactic function or position in the sentence. While hearing the first-mentioned argument, listeners fixated on the corresponding referent in the display accordingly and then initiated saccades to the last-mentioned referent before it was encountered. The results indicate that listeners used verbal semantics to identify referents and their semantic roles early; information about word order or syntactic functions did not influence anticipatory gaze behavior directly after the verb was heard. In this verb-initial language, event semantics takes early precedence during the comprehension of sentences, while arguments are anticipated temporally more local to when they are encountered. The current experiment thus helps to better understand anticipation during language processing by employing linguistic structures not available in previously studied subject-initial languages.
AN ERP STUDY OF REGULAR AND IRREGULAR ENGLISH PAST TENSE INFLECTION
Newman, Aaron J.; Ullman, Michael T.; Pancheva, Roumyana; Waligura, Diane L.; Neville, Helen J.
2006-01-01
Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs (“regulars”) is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, “irregular” English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over right parietal sites (P600s), and which seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory. PMID:17070703
Memory mechanisms supporting syntactic comprehension.
Caplan, David; Waters, Gloria
2013-04-01
Efforts to characterize the memory system that supports sentence comprehension have historically drawn extensively on short-term memory as a source of mechanisms that might apply to sentences. The focus of these efforts has changed significantly in the past decade. As a result of changes in models of short-term working memory (ST-WM) and developments in models of sentence comprehension, the effort to relate entire components of an ST-WM system, such as those in the model developed by Baddeley (Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4: 829-839, 2003) to sentence comprehension has largely been replaced by an effort to relate more specific mechanisms found in modern models of ST-WM to memory processes that support one aspect of sentence comprehension--the assignment of syntactic structure (parsing) and its use in determining sentence meaning (interpretation) during sentence comprehension. In this article, we present the historical background to recent studies of the memory mechanisms that support parsing and interpretation and review recent research into this relation. We argue that the results of this research do not converge on a set of mechanisms derived from ST-WM that apply to parsing and interpretation. We argue that the memory mechanisms supporting parsing and interpretation have features that characterize another memory system that has been postulated to account for skilled performance-long-term working memory. We propose a model of the relation of different aspects of parsing and interpretation to ST-WM and long-term working memory.
Understanding Zipf's law of word frequencies through sample-space collapse in sentence formation
Thurner, Stefan; Hanel, Rudolf; Liu, Bo; Corominas-Murtra, Bernat
2015-01-01
The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the ‘history’ of word usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple history-dependent model of text generation assuming that the sample-space of word usage reduces along sentence formation, on average. We first show that the model explains the approximate Zipf law found in word frequencies as a direct consequence of sample-space reduction. We then empirically quantify the amount of sample-space reduction in the sentences of 10 famous English books, by analysis of corresponding word-transition tables that capture which words can follow any given word in a text. We find a highly nested structure in these transition tables and show that this ‘nestedness’ is tightly related to the power law exponents of the observed word frequency distributions. With the proposed model, it is possible to understand that the nestedness of a text can be the origin of the actual scaling exponent and that deviations from the exact Zipf law can be understood by variations of the degree of nestedness on a book-by-book basis. On a theoretical level, we are able to show that in the case of weak nesting, Zipf's law breaks down in a fast transition. Unlike previous attempts to understand Zipf's law in language the sample-space reducing model is not based on assumptions of multiplicative, preferential or self-organized critical mechanisms behind language formation, but simply uses the empirically quantifiable parameter ‘nestedness’ to understand the statistics of word frequencies. PMID:26063827
Understanding Zipf's law of word frequencies through sample-space collapse in sentence formation.
Thurner, Stefan; Hanel, Rudolf; Liu, Bo; Corominas-Murtra, Bernat
2015-07-06
The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the 'history' of word usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple history-dependent model of text generation assuming that the sample-space of word usage reduces along sentence formation, on average. We first show that the model explains the approximate Zipf law found in word frequencies as a direct consequence of sample-space reduction. We then empirically quantify the amount of sample-space reduction in the sentences of 10 famous English books, by analysis of corresponding word-transition tables that capture which words can follow any given word in a text. We find a highly nested structure in these transition tables and show that this 'nestedness' is tightly related to the power law exponents of the observed word frequency distributions. With the proposed model, it is possible to understand that the nestedness of a text can be the origin of the actual scaling exponent and that deviations from the exact Zipf law can be understood by variations of the degree of nestedness on a book-by-book basis. On a theoretical level, we are able to show that in the case of weak nesting, Zipf's law breaks down in a fast transition. Unlike previous attempts to understand Zipf's law in language the sample-space reducing model is not based on assumptions of multiplicative, preferential or self-organized critical mechanisms behind language formation, but simply uses the empirically quantifiable parameter 'nestedness' to understand the statistics of word frequencies. © 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
Incorporating conditional random fields and active learning to improve sentiment identification.
Zhang, Kunpeng; Xie, Yusheng; Yang, Yi; Sun, Aaron; Liu, Hengchang; Choudhary, Alok
2014-10-01
Many machine learning, statistical, and computational linguistic methods have been developed to identify sentiment of sentences in documents, yielding promising results. However, most of state-of-the-art methods focus on individual sentences and ignore the impact of context on the meaning of a sentence. In this paper, we propose a method based on conditional random fields to incorporate sentence structure and context information in addition to syntactic information for improving sentiment identification. We also investigate how human interaction affects the accuracy of sentiment labeling using limited training data. We propose and evaluate two different active learning strategies for labeling sentiment data. Our experiments with the proposed approach demonstrate a 5%-15% improvement in accuracy on Amazon customer reviews compared to existing supervised learning and rule-based methods. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Performance of an online translation tool when applied to patient educational material.
Khanna, Raman R; Karliner, Leah S; Eck, Matthias; Vittinghoff, Eric; Koenig, Christopher J; Fang, Margaret C
2011-11-01
Language barriers may prevent clinicians from tailoring patient educational material to the needs of individuals with limited English proficiency. Online translation tools could fill this gap, but their accuracy is unknown. We evaluated the accuracy of an online translation tool for patient educational material. We selected 45 sentences from a pamphlet available in both English and Spanish, and translated it into Spanish using GoogleTranslate™ (GT). Three bilingual Spanish speakers then performed a blinded evaluation on these 45 sentences, comparing GT-translated sentences to those translated professionally, along four domains: fluency (grammatical correctness), adequacy (information preservation), meaning (connotation maintenance), and severity (perceived dangerousness of an error if present). In addition, evaluators indicated whether they had a preference for either the GT-translated or professionally translated sentences. The GT-translated sentences had significantly lower fluency scores compared to the professional translation (3.4 vs. 4.7, P < 0.001), but similar adequacy (4.2 vs. 4.5, P = 0.19) and meaning (4.5 vs. 4.8, P = 0.29) scores. The GT-translated sentences were more likely to have any error (39% vs. 22%, P = 0.05), but not statistically more likely to have a severe error (4% vs. 2%, P = 0.61). Evaluators preferred the professional translation for complex sentences, but not for simple ones. When applied to patient educational material, GT performed comparably to professional human translation in terms of preserving information and meaning, though it was slightly worse in preserving grammar. In situations where professional human translations are unavailable or impractical, online translation may someday fill an important niche. Copyright © 2011 Society of Hospital Medicine.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Schipke, Christine S.; Knoll, Lisa J.; Friederici, Angela D.; Oberecker, Regine
2012-01-01
The acquisition of the function of case-marking is a key step in the development of sentence processing for German-speaking children since case-marking reveals the relations between sentential arguments. In this study, we investigated the development of the processing of case-marking and argument structures in children at 3, 4;6 and 6 years of…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Gamlin, Peter J.
1971-01-01
Examines the effects of short term memory (STM) capacity, meaningfulness of stimuli, and age upon listeners' structuring of sentences. Results show that the interaction between STM capacity and meaningfulness (1) approached significance when data were collapsed over both age levels, and (2) was significant for one age level. Tables and references.…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bernstein, Lynne E.
2018-01-01
Lipreaders recognize words with phonetically impoverished stimuli, an ability that varies widely in normal-hearing adults. Lipreading accuracy for sentence stimuli was modeled with data from 339 normal-hearing adults. Models used measures of phonemic perceptual errors, insertion of text that was not in the stimulus, gender, and auditory speech…
Burchert, Frank; Meissner, Nadine; De Bleser, Ria
2008-02-01
The study reported here compares two linguistically informed hypotheses on agrammatic sentence production, the TPH [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397-425.] and the DOP [Bastiaanse, R., & van Zonneveld, R. (2005). Sentence production with verbs of alternating transitivity in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 18, 59-66]. To explain impaired production of non-canonical sentences in agrammatism, the TPH basically relies on deleted or pruned clause structure positions in the left periphery, whereas the DOP appeals to limitations in the application of movement rules. Certain non-canonical sentences such as object-questions and object-relative clauses require the availability of nodes in the left periphery as well as movement to these nodes. In languages with relatively fixed word order such as English, the relevant test cases generally involve a coincidence of left periphery and movement, such that the predictions of the TPH and the DOP are identical although for different reasons. In languages with relatively free word order such as German, on the other hand, it is possible to devise specific tests of the different predictions due to the availability of scrambling. Scrambled object sentences, for example, do not involve the left periphery but do require application of movement in a domain below the left periphery. A study was conducted with German agrammatic subjects which elicited canonical sentences without object movement and non-canonical scrambled sentences with object movement. The results show that agrammatic speakers have a particular problem with the production of scrambled sentences. Further evidence reported in the study from spontaneous speech, elicitation of object relatives, questions and passives and with different agrammatic subjects confirms that non-canonical sentences are generally harder to produce for agrammatics. These findings provide evidence in favor of the DOP and it will be argued that a cross-modal explanation of agrammatic deficits is possible if two factors--movement and canonicity--are taken into consideration.
Syntactic Complexity Effects in Sentence Production
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Scontras, Gregory; Badecker, William; Shank, Lisa; Lim, Eunice; Fedorenko, Evelina
2015-01-01
Syntactic complexity effects have been investigated extensively with respect to comprehension (e.g., Demberg & Keller, 2008; Gibson, 1998, 2000; Gordon et al., 2001, 2004; Grodner & Gibson, 2005; King & Just, 1991; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis et al., 2006; McElree et al., 2003; Wanner & Maratsos, 1978). According to one…
Representational Complexity and Memory Retrieval in Language Comprehension
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hofmeister, Philip
2011-01-01
Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by…
Learning to Construct Verbs in Navajo and Quechua
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Courtney, Ellen H.; Saville-Troike, Muriel
2002-01-01
Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the acquisition of inflectional systems. The development of the verb in the two languages is especially interesting, since the morphology encodes diverse grammatical notions, with the complex verb often constituting the entire sentence. While the…
What is it that lingers? Garden-path (mis)interpretations in younger and older adults.
Malyutina, Svetlana; den Ouden, Dirk-Bart
2016-01-01
Previous research has shown that comprehenders do not always conduct a full (re)analysis of temporarily ambiguous "garden-path" sentences. The present study used a sentence-picture matching task to investigate what kind of representations are formed when full reanalysis is not performed: Do comprehenders "blend" two incompatible representations as a result of shallow syntactic processing or do they erroneously maintain the initial incorrect parsing without incorporating new information, and does this vary with age? Twenty-five younger and 15 older adults performed a multiple-choice sentence-picture matching task with stimuli including early-closure garden-path sentences. The results suggest that the type of erroneous representation is affected by linguistic variables, such as sentence structure, verb type, and semantic plausibility, as well as by age. Older adults' response patterns indicate an increased reliance on inferencing based on lexical and semantic cues, with a lower bar for accepting an initial parse and with a weaker drive to reanalyse a syntactic representation. Among younger adults, there was a tendency to blend two representations into a single interpretation, even if this was not licensed by the syntax.
Meister, Cindy; Gulko, Miriam Kolog; Köhler, Anna M; Braus, Gerhard H
2016-02-01
The COP9 signalosome (CSN) and the proteasomal LID are conserved macromolecular complexes composed of at least eight subunits with molecular weights of approximately 350 kDa. CSN and LID are part of the ubiquitin–proteasome pathway and cleave isopeptide linkages of lysine side chains on target proteins. CSN cleaves the isopeptide bond of ubiquitin-like protein Nedd8 from cullins, whereas the LID cleaves ubiquitin from target proteins sentenced for degradation. CSN and LID are structurally and functionally similar but the order of the assembly pathway seems to be different. The assembly differs in at least the last subunit joining the pre-assembled subcomplex. This review addresses the similarities and differences in structure, function and assembly of CSN and LID.
Revise and resubmit: How real-time parsing limitations influence grammar acquisition
Pozzan, Lucia; Trueswell, John C.
2015-01-01
We present the results from a three-day artificial language learning study on adults. The study examined whether sentence-parsing limitations, in particular, difficulties revising initial syntactic/semantic commitments during comprehension, shape learners’ ability to acquire a language. Findings show that both comprehension and production of morphology pertaining to sentence argument structure are delayed when this morphology consistently appears at the end, rather than at the beginning, of sentences in otherwise identical grammatical systems. This suggests that real-time processing constraints impact acquisition; morphological cues that tend to guide linguistic analyses are easier to learn than cues that revise these analyses. Parallel performance in production and comprehension indicates that parsing constraints affect grammatical acquisition, not just real-time commitments. Properties of the linguistic system (e.g., ordering of cues within a sentence) interact with the properties of the cognitive system (cognitive control and conflict-resolution abilities) and together affect language acquisition. PMID:26026607
2 1/2-Year-Old Children Use Animacy and Syntax to Learn a New Noun
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Childers, Jane B.; Echols, Catharine H.
2004-01-01
We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 x 3…
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hasson, Natalie; Dodd, Barbara; Botting, Nicola
2012-01-01
Background: Sentence construction and syntactic organization are known to be poor in children with specific language impairments (SLI), but little is known about the way in which children with SLI approach language tasks, and static standardized tests contribute little to the differentiation of skills within the population of children with…
Memory mechanisms supporting syntactic comprehension
Waters, Gloria
2013-01-01
Efforts to characterize the memory system that supports sentence comprehension have historically drawn extensively on short-term memory as a source of mechanisms that might apply to sentences. The focus of these efforts has changed significantly in the past decade. As a result of changes in models of short-term working memory (ST-WM) and developments in models of sentence comprehension, the effort to relate entire components of an ST-WM system, such as those in the model developed by Baddeley (Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4: 829–839, 2003) to sentence comprehension has largely been replaced by an effort to relate more specific mechanisms found in modern models of ST-WM to memory processes that support one aspect of sentence comprehension—the assignment of syntactic structure (parsing) and its use in determining sentence meaning (interpretation) during sentence comprehension. In this article, we present the historical background to recent studies of the memory mechanisms that support parsing and interpretation and review recent research into this relation. We argue that the results of this research do not converge on a set of mechanisms derived from ST-WM that apply to parsing and interpretation. We argue that the memory mechanisms supporting parsing and interpretation have features that characterize another memory system that has been postulated to account for skilled performance—long-term working memory. We propose a model of the relation of different aspects of parsing and interpretation to ST-WM and long-term working memory. PMID:23319178
Kollmeier, Birger; Neher, Tobias
2016-01-01
This study assessed the effects of hearing aid (HA) experience on how quickly a participant can grasp the meaning of an acoustic sentence-in-noise stimulus presented together with two similar pictures that either correctly (target) or incorrectly (competitor) depict the meaning conveyed by the sentence. Using an eye tracker, the time taken by the participant to start fixating the target (the processing time) was measured for two levels of linguistic complexity (low vs. high) and three HA conditions: clinical linear amplification (National Acoustic Laboratories-Revised), single-microphone noise reduction with National Acoustic Laboratories-Revised, and linear amplification ensuring a sensation level of ≥ 15 dB up to at least 4 kHz for the speech material used here. Timed button presses to the target stimuli after the end of the sentences (offline reaction times) were also collected. Groups of experienced (eHA) and inexperienced (iHA) HA users matched in terms of age, hearing loss, and working memory capacity took part (N = 15 each). For the offline reaction times, no effects were found. In contrast, processing times increased with linguistic complexity. Furthermore, for all HA conditions, processing times were longer (poorer) for the iHA group than for the eHA group, despite comparable speech recognition performance. Taken together, these results indicate that processing times are more sensitive to speech processing-related factors than offline reaction times. Furthermore, they support the idea that HA experience positively impacts the ability to process noisy speech quickly, irrespective of the precise gain characteristics. PMID:27595793
Complicating Canons: A Critical Literacy Challenge to Common Core Assessment
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Peel, Anne
2017-01-01
The widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards in the US has prioritized rigorous reading of complex texts. The emphasis on text complexity has led to instructional and assessment materials that constrain critical literacy practices by emphasizing quantitative features of text, such as sentence length, and a static list of text…
Language Muse: Automated Linguistic Activity Generation for English Language Learners
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Madnani, Nitin; Burstein, Jill; Sabatini, John; Biggers, Kietha; Andreyev, Slava
2016-01-01
Current education standards in the U.S. require school students to read and understand complex texts from different subject areas (e.g., social studies). However, such texts usually contain figurative language, complex phrases and sentences, as well as unfamiliar discourse relations. This may present an obstacle to students whose native language…
Complexity in Child Language. Final Report.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Gordon, Alice M.
The complexity of language of four, five, and six year old children was examined in a psycholinguistic study that attempted to differentiate the characteristics of sentences that were difficult for children to comprehend from those which were easy, and to discover whether children used a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) language strategy to interpret…
Kirjavainen, Minna; Kidd, Evan; Lieven, Elena
2017-01-01
We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested children's comprehension of subject, object, and two types of oblique relatives. No difference was found in the children's performance on different structures, including a lack of previously widely reported asymmetry between subject and object relatives. However, children's comprehension was modulated by animacy of the head referent. Study 3 tested children's production of the same RC structures using sentence repetition. Again we found no subject-object asymmetry. The pattern of results suggested that distributional frequency patterns and the relative complexity of the relativizer contribute to the difficulty associated with particular RC structures.
Herbert, C; Kissler, J
2014-09-26
In sentences such as dogs cannot fly/bark, evaluation of the truth-value of the sentence is assumed to appear after the negation has been integrated into the sentence structure. Moreover negation processing and truth-value processing are considered effortful processes, whereas processing of the semantic relatedness of the words within sentences is thought to occur automatically. In the present study, modulation of event-related brain potentials (N400 and late positive potential, LPP) was investigated during an implicit task (silent listening) and active truth-value evaluation to test these theoretical assumptions and determine if truth-value evaluation will be modulated by the way participants processed the negated information implicitly prior to truth-value verification. Participants first listened to negated sentences and then evaluated these sentences for their truth-value in an active evaluation task. During passive listening, the LPP was generally more pronounced for targets in false negative (FN) than true negative (TN) sentences, indicating enhanced attention allocation to semantically-related but false targets. N400 modulation by truth-value (FN>TN) was observed in 11 out of 24 participants. However, during active evaluation, processing of semantically-unrelated but true targets (TN) elicited larger N400 and LPP amplitudes as well as a pronounced frontal negativity. This pattern was particularly prominent in those 11 individuals, whose N400 modulation during silent listening indicated that they were more sensitive to violations of the truth-value than to semantic priming effects. The results provide evidence for implicit truth-value processing during silent listening of negated sentences and for task dependence related to inter-individual differences in implicit negation processing. Copyright © 2014 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Priming of Early Closure: Evidence for the Lexical Boost during Sentence Comprehension
Traxler, Matthew J.
2014-01-01
Two self-paced reading experiments investigated priming in sentences containing “early” vs. “late closure” ambiguities. Early closure sentences impose relatively large processing costs at the point of syntactic disambiguation (Frazier & Rayner, 1982). The current study investigated a possible way to reduce processing costs. Target sentences were temporarily ambiguous and were disambiguated towards either the preferred “late” closure analysis or the dispreferred “early” closure analysis. Each target sentence was preceded by a prime that was either structurally identical or that required a different syntactic analysis. In Experiment 1, all of the prime sentences shared the same critical verb as the target (Arai et al., 2007; Carminati et al., 2008; Tooley et al., 2009, in press; Traxler et al., in press; Weber & Indefrey, 2009). In Experiment 2, verb repetition was eliminated by reorganizing the stimuli from Experiment 1. In Experiment 1, processing of the disambiguating verb was facilitated when an “early” closure target sentence followed an “early” closure prime. In Experiment 2, there were no significant priming effects, although an overall difference in processing time favored “late closure” targets. Combined analyses verified that the pattern of results in Experiment 1 differed significantly from Experiment 2. These experiments provide the first indication that “early” closure analyses can be primed and that such priming is more robust when a critical verb appears in both the prime and the target sentence. The results add to the body of data indicating a “lexical boost” for syntactic priming effects during comprehension. They have implications for theories of syntactic representation and processing (e.g., Boland & Blodgett, 2006; Vosse & Kempen, 2009; Sag et al., 2003). PMID:25750915
Kello, Christopher T; Bella, Simone Dalla; Médé, Butovens; Balasubramaniam, Ramesh
2017-10-01
Humans talk, sing and play music. Some species of birds and whales sing long and complex songs. All these behaviours and sounds exhibit hierarchical structure-syllables and notes are positioned within words and musical phrases, words and motives in sentences and musical phrases, and so on. We developed a new method to measure and compare hierarchical temporal structures in speech, song and music. The method identifies temporal events as peaks in the sound amplitude envelope, and quantifies event clustering across a range of timescales using Allan factor (AF) variance. AF variances were analysed and compared for over 200 different recordings from more than 16 different categories of signals, including recordings of speech in different contexts and languages, musical compositions and performances from different genres. Non-human vocalizations from two bird species and two types of marine mammals were also analysed for comparison. The resulting patterns of AF variance across timescales were distinct to each of four natural categories of complex sound: speech, popular music, classical music and complex animal vocalizations. Comparisons within and across categories indicated that nested clustering in longer timescales was more prominent when prosodic variation was greater, and when sounds came from interactions among individuals, including interactions between speakers, musicians, and even killer whales. Nested clustering also was more prominent for music compared with speech, and reflected beat structure for popular music and self-similarity across timescales for classical music. In summary, hierarchical temporal structures reflect the behavioural and social processes underlying complex vocalizations and musical performances. © 2017 The Author(s).
Van de Cavey, Joris; Hartsuiker, Robert J
2016-01-01
Cognitive processing in many domains (e.g., sentence comprehension, music listening, and math solving) requires sequential information to be organized into an integrational structure. There appears to be some overlap in integrational processing across domains, as shown by cross-domain interference effects when for example linguistic and musical stimuli are jointly presented (Koelsch, Gunter, Wittfoth, & Sammler, 2005; Slevc, Rosenberg, & Patel, 2009). These findings support theories of overlapping resources for integrational processing across domains (cfr. SSIRH Patel, 2003; SWM, Kljajevic, 2010). However, there are some limitations to the studies mentioned above, such as the frequent use of unnaturalistic integrational difficulties. In recent years, the idea has risen that evidence for domain-generality in structural processing might also be yielded though priming paradigms (cfr. Scheepers, 2003). The rationale behind this is that integrational processing across domains regularly requires the processing of dependencies across short or long distances in the sequence, involving respectively less or more syntactic working memory resources (cfr. SWM, Kljajevic, 2010), and such processing decisions might persist over time. However, whereas recent studies have shown suggestive priming of integrational structure between language and arithmetics (though often dependent on arithmetic performance, cfr. Scheepers et al., 2011; Scheepers & Sturt, 2014), it remains to be investigated to what extent we can also find evidence for priming in other domains, such as music and action (cfr. SWM, Kljajevic, 2010). Experiment 1a showed structural priming from the processing of musical sequences onto the position in the sentence structure (early or late) to which a relative clause was attached in subsequent sentence completion. Importantly, Experiment 1b showed that a similar structural manipulation based on non-hierarchically ordered color sequences did not yield any priming effect, suggesting that the priming effect is not based on linear order, but integrational dependency. Finally, Experiment 2 presented primes in four domains (relative clause sentences, music, mathematics, and structured descriptions of actions), and consistently showed priming within and across domains. These findings provide clear evidence for domain-general structural processing mechanisms. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Together They Stand: Interpreting Not-At-Issue Content.
Frazier, Lyn; Dillon, Brian; Clifton, Charles
2018-06-01
Potts unified the account of appositives, parentheticals, expressives, and honorifics as 'Not- At-Issue' (NAI) content, treating them as a natural class semantically in behaving like root (unembedded) structures, typically expressing speaker commitments, and being interpreted independently of At-Issue content. We propose that NAI content expresses a complete speech act distinct from the speech act of the containing utterance. The speech act hypothesis leads us to expect the semantic properties Potts established. We present experimental confirmation of two intuitive observations made by Potts: first that speech act adverbs should be acceptable as NAI content, supporting the speech act hypothesis; and second, that when two speech acts are expressed as successive sentences, the comprehender assumes they are related by some discourse coherence relation, whereas an NAI speech act need not bear a restrictive discourse coherence relation to its containing utterance, though overall sentences containing relevant content are rated more acceptable than those that do not. The speech act hypothesis accounts for these effects, and further accounts for why judgments of syntactic complexity or evaluations of whether or not a statement is true interact with the at-issue status of the material being judged or evaluated.
Mechanism of case processing in the brain: an fMRI study.
Yokoyama, Satoru; Maki, Hideki; Hashimoto, Yosuke; Toma, Masahiko; Kawashima, Ryuta
2012-01-01
In sentence comprehension research, the case system, which is one of the subsystems of the language processing system, has been assumed to play a crucial role in signifying relationships in sentences between noun phrases (NPs) and other elements, such as verbs, prepositions, nouns, and tense. However, so far, less attention has been paid to the question of how cases are processed in our brain. To this end, the current study used fMRI and scanned the brain activity of 15 native English speakers during an English-case processing task. The results showed that, while the processing of all cases activates the left inferior frontal gyrus and posterior part of the middle temporal gyrus, genitive case processing activates these two regions more than nominative and accusative case processing. Since the effect of the difference in behavioral performance among these three cases is excluded from brain activation data, the observed different brain activations would be due to the different processing patterns among the cases, indicating that cases are processed differently in our brains. The different brain activations between genitive case processing and nominative/accusative case processing may be due to the difference in structural complexity between them.
Oh, Soo Hee; Donaldson, Gail S.; Kong, Ying-Yee
2016-01-01
Objectives Previous studies have documented the benefits of bimodal hearing as compared with a CI alone, but most have focused on the importance of bottom-up, low-frequency cues. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the role of top-down processing in bimodal hearing by measuring the effect of sentence context on bimodal benefit for temporally interrupted sentences. It was hypothesized that low-frequency acoustic cues would facilitate the use of contextual information in the interrupted sentences, resulting in greater bimodal benefit for the higher context (CUNY) sentences than for the lower context (IEEE) sentences. Design Young normal-hearing listeners were tested in simulated bimodal listening conditions in which noise band vocoded sentences were presented to one ear with or without low-pass (LP) filtered speech or LP harmonic complexes (LPHCs) presented to the contralateral ear. Speech recognition scores were measured in three listening conditions: vocoder-alone, vocoder combined with LP speech, and vocoder combined with LPHCs. Temporally interrupted versions of the CUNY and IEEE sentences were used to assess listeners’ ability to fill in missing segments of speech by using top-down linguistic processing. Sentences were square-wave gated at a rate of 5 Hz with a 50 percent duty cycle. Three vocoder channel conditions were tested for each type of sentence (8, 12, and 16 channels for CUNY; 12, 16, and 32 channels for IEEE) and bimodal benefit was compared for similar amounts of spectral degradation (matched-channel comparisons) and similar ranges of baseline performance. Two gain measures, percentage-point gain and normalized gain, were examined. Results Significant effects of context on bimodal benefit were observed when LP speech was presented to the residual-hearing ear. For the matched-channel comparisons, CUNY sentences showed significantly higher normalized gains than IEEE sentences for both the 12-channel (20 points higher) and 16-channel (18 points higher) conditions. For the individual gain comparisons that used a similar range of baseline performance, CUNY sentences showed bimodal benefits that were significantly higher (7 percentage points, or 15 points normalized gain) than those for IEEE sentences. The bimodal benefits observed here for temporally interrupted speech were considerably smaller than those observed in an earlier study that used continuous speech (Kong et al., 2015). Further, unlike previous findings for continuous speech, no bimodal benefit was observed when LPHCs were presented to the LP ear. Conclusions Findings indicate that linguistic context has a significant influence on bimodal benefit for temporally interrupted speech and support the hypothesis that low-frequency acoustic information presented to the residual-hearing ear facilitates the use of top-down linguistic processing in bimodal hearing. However, bimodal benefit is reduced for temporally interrupted speech as compared to continuous speech, suggesting that listeners’ ability to restore missing speech information depends not only on top-down linguistic knowledge, but also on the quality of the bottom-up sensory input. PMID:27007220
The P-chain: relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition
Dell, Gary S.; Chang, Franklin
2014-01-01
This article introduces the P-chain, an emerging framework for theory in psycholinguistics that unifies research on comprehension, production and acquisition. The framework proposes that language processing involves incremental prediction, which is carried out by the production system. Prediction necessarily leads to prediction error, which drives learning, including both adaptive adjustment to the mature language processing system as well as language acquisition. To illustrate the P-chain, we review the Dual-path model of sentence production, a connectionist model that explains structural priming in production and a number of facts about language acquisition. The potential of this and related models for explaining acquired and developmental disorders of sentence production is discussed. PMID:24324238
The P-chain: relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition.
Dell, Gary S; Chang, Franklin
2014-01-01
This article introduces the P-chain, an emerging framework for theory in psycholinguistics that unifies research on comprehension, production and acquisition. The framework proposes that language processing involves incremental prediction, which is carried out by the production system. Prediction necessarily leads to prediction error, which drives learning, including both adaptive adjustment to the mature language processing system as well as language acquisition. To illustrate the P-chain, we review the Dual-path model of sentence production, a connectionist model that explains structural priming in production and a number of facts about language acquisition. The potential of this and related models for explaining acquired and developmental disorders of sentence production is discussed.
Ohta, Shinri; Fukui, Naoki; Sakai, Kuniyoshi L.
2013-01-01
The nature of computational principles of syntax remains to be elucidated. One promising approach to this problem would be to construct formal and abstract linguistic models that parametrically predict the activation modulations in the regions specialized for linguistic processes. In this article, we review recent advances in theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging in the following respects. First, we introduce the two fundamental linguistic operations: Merge (which combines two words or phrases to form a larger structure) and Search (which searches and establishes a syntactic relation of two words or phrases). We also illustrate certain universal properties of human language, and present hypotheses regarding how sentence structures are processed in the brain. Hypothesis I is that the Degree of Merger (DoM), i.e., the maximum depth of merged subtrees within a given domain, is a key computational concept to properly measure the complexity of tree structures. Hypothesis II is that the basic frame of the syntactic structure of a given linguistic expression is determined essentially by functional elements, which trigger Merge and Search. We then present our recent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, demonstrating that the DoM is indeed a key syntactic factor that accounts for syntax-selective activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus. Hypothesis III is that the DoM domain changes dynamically in accordance with iterative Merge applications, the Search distances, and/or task requirements. We confirm that the DoM accounts for activations in various sentence types. Hypothesis III successfully explains activation differences between object- and subject-relative clauses, as well as activations during explicit syntactic judgment tasks. A future research on the computational principles of syntax will further deepen our understanding of uniquely human mental faculties. PMID:24385957
Ohta, Shinri; Fukui, Naoki; Sakai, Kuniyoshi L
2013-01-01
The nature of computational principles of syntax remains to be elucidated. One promising approach to this problem would be to construct formal and abstract linguistic models that parametrically predict the activation modulations in the regions specialized for linguistic processes. In this article, we review recent advances in theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging in the following respects. First, we introduce the two fundamental linguistic operations: Merge (which combines two words or phrases to form a larger structure) and Search (which searches and establishes a syntactic relation of two words or phrases). We also illustrate certain universal properties of human language, and present hypotheses regarding how sentence structures are processed in the brain. Hypothesis I is that the Degree of Merger (DoM), i.e., the maximum depth of merged subtrees within a given domain, is a key computational concept to properly measure the complexity of tree structures. Hypothesis II is that the basic frame of the syntactic structure of a given linguistic expression is determined essentially by functional elements, which trigger Merge and Search. We then present our recent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, demonstrating that the DoM is indeed a key syntactic factor that accounts for syntax-selective activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus. Hypothesis III is that the DoM domain changes dynamically in accordance with iterative Merge applications, the Search distances, and/or task requirements. We confirm that the DoM accounts for activations in various sentence types. Hypothesis III successfully explains activation differences between object- and subject-relative clauses, as well as activations during explicit syntactic judgment tasks. A future research on the computational principles of syntax will further deepen our understanding of uniquely human mental faculties.
Guo, Yufan; Silins, Ilona; Stenius, Ulla; Korhonen, Anna
2013-06-01
Techniques that are capable of automatically analyzing the information structure of scientific articles could be highly useful for improving information access to biomedical literature. However, most existing approaches rely on supervised machine learning (ML) and substantial labeled data that are expensive to develop and apply to different sub-fields of biomedicine. Recent research shows that minimal supervision is sufficient for fairly accurate information structure analysis of biomedical abstracts. However, is it realistic for full articles given their high linguistic and informational complexity? We introduce and release a novel corpus of 50 biomedical articles annotated according to the Argumentative Zoning (AZ) scheme, and investigate active learning with one of the most widely used ML models-Support Vector Machines (SVM)-on this corpus. Additionally, we introduce two novel applications that use AZ to support real-life literature review in biomedicine via question answering and summarization. We show that active learning with SVM trained on 500 labeled sentences (6% of the corpus) performs surprisingly well with the accuracy of 82%, just 2% lower than fully supervised learning. In our question answering task, biomedical researchers find relevant information significantly faster from AZ-annotated than unannotated articles. In the summarization task, sentences extracted from particular zones are significantly more similar to gold standard summaries than those extracted from particular sections of full articles. These results demonstrate that active learning of full articles' information structure is indeed realistic and the accuracy is high enough to support real-life literature review in biomedicine. The annotated corpus, our AZ classifier and the two novel applications are available at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/yg244/12bioinfo.html
Mitchell, Rachel L C; Vidaki, Kleio; Lavidor, Michal
2016-10-01
For complex linguistic strings such as idioms, making a decision as to the correct meaning may require complex top-down cognitive control such as the suppression of incorrect alternative meanings. In the study presented here, we used transcranial direct current stimulation to test the hypothesis that a domain general dorsolateral prefrontal cognitive control network is involved in constraining the complex processing involved. Specifically, we sought to test prominent theoretical stances on the division of labour across dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the left- and right-hemispheres of the brain, including the role of salience and fine vs. coarse semantic coding. 32 healthy young adult participants were randomly allocated to one of two stimulation montage groups (LH anodal/RH cathodal or RH anodal/LH cathodal). Participants were tested twice, completing a semantic decision task after either receiving active or sham stimulation. The semantic decision task required participants to judge the relatedness of an idiom and a target word. The target word was figuratively related, literally related, or unrelated to the idiom. Control non-literal non-idiomatic sentences were also included that only had a literal meaning. The results showed that left-hemisphere dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is highly involved in processing figurative language, whereas both left- and right- dorsolateral prefrontal cortex contributed to literal language processing. In comparison, semantic processing for the non-idiomatic control sentences did not require domain general cognitive control as it relates to suppression of the rejected alternative meaning. The results are discussed in terms of the interplay between need for domain general cognitive control in understanding the meaning of complex sentences, hemispheric differences in semantic processing, and salience detection. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Kuruvilla, Mili; Murdoch, Bruce; Goozèe, Justine
2007-06-01
To explore articulatory kinematic differences between normal and dysarthric speakers post-traumatic brain injury (TBI) during syllable and sentence productions. A comparison between the control, mild (MTBI) and severe TBI groups for all measured kinematic parameters was carried out using the Kruskal Wallis test. Ten participants with a severe TBI and six post-MTBI formed the experimental group. The control group consisted of 14 age and sex matched non-neurologically impaired speakers. Articulatory kinematic profiles for the three groups were obtained using the Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA) while repeating sentence and syllable embedded /t/ and /k/ productions at a habitual rate and loudness level. Significant differences between the severe TBI and control group were identified only for the release phase of the /t/ sentence productions wherein an increase in mean maximum acceleration was observed for the severe TBI group. While a simple syllable repetition task at a moderate rate was unable to differentiate the three groups, a complex sentence production task precipitated an increase in mean maximum acceleration which may be indicative of increased articulatory effort and impaired speech motor control even at a convenient rate for the severe group.
Oyama, Yoshinori
2011-06-01
The present study examined Japanese university students' processing time for English subject and object relative clauses in relation to their English listening proficiency. In Analysis 1, the relation between English listening proficiency and reading span test scores was analyzed. The results showed that the high and low listening comprehension groups' reading span test scores do not differ. Analysis 2 investigated English listening proficiency and processing time for sentences with subject and object relative clauses. The results showed that reading the relative clause ending and the main verb section of a sentence with an object relative clause (such as "attacked" and "admitted" in the sentence "The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error") takes less time for learners with high English listening scores than for learners with low English listening scores. In Analysis 3, English listening proficiency and comprehension accuracy for sentences with subject and object relative clauses were examined. The results showed no significant difference in comprehension accuracy between the high and low listening-comprehension groups. These results indicate that processing time for English relative clauses is related to the cognitive processes involved in listening comprehension, which requires immediate processing of syntactically complex audio information.
Effects of plausibility on structural priming.
Christianson, Kiel; Luke, Steven G; Ferreira, Fernanda
2010-03-01
We report a replication and extension of Ferreira (2003), in which it was observed that native adult English speakers misinterpret passive sentences that relate implausible but not impossible semantic relationships (e.g., The angler was caught by the fish) significantly more often than they do plausible passives or plausible or implausible active sentences. In the experiment reported here, participants listened to the same plausible and implausible passive and active sentences as in Ferreira (2003), answered comprehension questions, and then orally described line drawings of simple transitive actions. The descriptions were analyzed as a measure of structural priming (Bock, 1986). Question accuracy data replicated Ferreira (2003). Production data yielded an interaction: Passive descriptions were produced more often after plausible passives and implausible actives. We interpret these results as indicative of a language processor that proceeds along differentiated morphosyntactic and semantic routes. The processor may end up adjudicating between conflicting outputs from these routes by settling on a "good enough" representation that is not completely faithful to the input.
Form and function: Optional complementizers reduce causal inferences
Rohde, Hannah; Tyler, Joseph; Carlson, Katy
2017-01-01
Many factors are known to influence the inference of the discourse coherence relationship between two sentences. Here, we examine the relationship between two conjoined embedded clauses in sentences like The professor noted that the student teacher did not look confident and (that) the students were poorly behaved. In two studies, we find that the presence of that before the second embedded clause in such sentences reduces the possibility of a forward causal relationship between the clauses, i.e., the inference that the student teacher’s confidence was what affected student behavior. Three further studies tested the possibility of a backward causal relationship between clauses in the same structure, and found that the complementizer’s presence aids that relationship, especially in a forced-choice paradigm. The empirical finding that a complementizer, a linguistic element associated primarily with structure rather than event-level semantics, can affect discourse coherence is novel and illustrates an interdependence between syntactic parsing and discourse parsing. PMID:28804781
Brief intervention for agrammatism in Primary Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia: A case report
Machado, Thais Helena; Campanha, Aline Carvalho; Caramelli, Paulo; Carthery-Goulart, Maria Teresa
2014-01-01
The non-fluent and agrammatic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (NFPPA) is characterized by reduced verbal production with deficits in building grammatically correct sentences, involving dysfunctions in syntactic and morphological levels of language. There are a growing number of studies about non-pharmacological alternatives focusing on the rehabilitation of functional aspects or specific cognitive impairments of each variant of PPA. This study reports a short-term treatment administered to a patient with NFPPA focusing on the production of sentences. The patient had significant reduction in verbal fluency, use of keywords, phrasal and grammatical simplifying as well as anomia. Using the method of errorless learning, six sessions were structured to stimulate the formation of sentences in the present and past with the cloze technique. The patient had improvement restricted to the strategy, with 100% accuracy on the trained phrases and generalization to untrained similar syntactic structure after training. These results persisted one month after the treatment. PMID:29213916
FigSum: automatically generating structured text summaries for figures in biomedical literature.
Agarwal, Shashank; Yu, Hong
2009-11-14
Figures are frequently used in biomedical articles to support research findings; however, they are often difficult to comprehend based on their legends alone and information from the full-text articles is required to fully understand them. Previously, we found that the information associated with a single figure is distributed throughout the full-text article the figure appears in. Here, we develop and evaluate a figure summarization system - FigSum, which aggregates this scattered information to improve figure comprehension. For each figure in an article, FigSum generates a structured text summary comprising one sentence from each of the four rhetorical categories - Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion (IMRaD). The IMRaD category of sentences is predicted by an automated machine learning classifier. Our evaluation shows that FigSum captures 53% of the sentences in the gold standard summaries annotated by biomedical scientists and achieves an average ROUGE-1 score of 0.70, which is higher than a baseline system.
FigSum: Automatically Generating Structured Text Summaries for Figures in Biomedical Literature
Agarwal, Shashank; Yu, Hong
2009-01-01
Figures are frequently used in biomedical articles to support research findings; however, they are often difficult to comprehend based on their legends alone and information from the full-text articles is required to fully understand them. Previously, we found that the information associated with a single figure is distributed throughout the full-text article the figure appears in. Here, we develop and evaluate a figure summarization system – FigSum, which aggregates this scattered information to improve figure comprehension. For each figure in an article, FigSum generates a structured text summary comprising one sentence from each of the four rhetorical categories – Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion (IMRaD). The IMRaD category of sentences is predicted by an automated machine learning classifier. Our evaluation shows that FigSum captures 53% of the sentences in the gold standard summaries annotated by biomedical scientists and achieves an average ROUGE-1 score of 0.70, which is higher than a baseline system. PMID:20351812
The logical syntax of number words: theory, acquisition and processing.
Musolino, Julien
2009-04-01
Recent work on the acquisition of number words has emphasized the importance of integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives [Musolino, J. (2004). The semantics and acquisition of number words: Integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives. Cognition93, 1-41; Papafragou, A., Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253-282; Hurewitz, F., Papafragou, A., Gleitman, L., Gelman, R. (2006). Asymmetries in the acquisition of numbers and quantifiers. Language Learning and Development, 2, 76-97; Huang, Y. T., Snedeker, J., Spelke, L. (submitted for publication). What exactly do numbers mean?]. Specifically, these studies have shown that data from experimental investigations of child language can be used to illuminate core theoretical issues in the semantic and pragmatic analysis of number terms. In this article, I extend this approach to the logico-syntactic properties of number words, focusing on the way numerals interact with each other (e.g. Three boys are holding two balloons) as well as with other quantified expressions (e.g. Three boys are holding each balloon). On the basis of their intuitions, linguists have claimed that such sentences give rise to at least four different interpretations, reflecting the complexity of the linguistic structure and syntactic operations involved. Using psycholinguistic experimentation with preschoolers (n=32) and adult speakers of English (n=32), I show that (a) for adults, the intuitions of linguists can be verified experimentally, (b) by the age of 5, children have knowledge of the core aspects of the logical syntax of number words, (c) in spite of this knowledge, children nevertheless differ from adults in systematic ways, (d) the differences observed between children and adults can be accounted for on the basis of an independently motivated, linguistically-based processing model [Geurts, B. (2003). Quantifying kids. Language Acquisition, 11(4), 197-218]. In doing so, this work ties together research on the acquisition of the number vocabulary with a growing body of work on the development of quantification and sentence processing abilities in young children [Geurts, 2003; Lidz, J., Musolino, J. (2002). Children's command of quantification. Cognition, 84, 113-154; Musolino, J., Lidz, J. (2003). The scope of isomorphism: Turning adults into children. Language Acquisition, 11(4), 277-291; Trueswell, J., Sekerina, I., Hilland, N., Logrip, M. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89-134; Noveck, I. (2001). When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition, 78, 165-188; Noveck, I., Guelminger, R., Georgieff, N., & Labruyere, N. (2007). What autism can tell us about every. . . not sentences. Journal of Semantics,24(1), 73-90. On a more general level, this work confirms the importance of integrating formal and developmental perspectives [Musolino, 2004], this time by highlighting the explanatory power of linguistically-based models of language acquisition and by showing that the complex structure postulated by linguists has important implications for developmental accounts of the number vocabulary.
Who Did What to Whom? Children Track Story Referents First in Gesture
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Stites, Lauren J.; Özçaliskan, Seyda
2017-01-01
Children achieve increasingly complex language milestones initially in gesture or in gesture+speech combinations before they do so in speech, from first words to first sentences. In this study, we ask whether gesture continues to be part of the language-learning process as children begin to develop more complex language skills, namely narratives.…
Thematic Roles, Markedness Alignment and Processing Complexity
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lee, Yoonhyoung; Kwon, Youan; Gordon, Peter C.
2015-01-01
Two experiments used eye-tracking during reading to investigate the role of the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of noun phrases (NPs) in the processing of complex sentences in Korean. To do so, the animacy of the first NP was varied in both experiments to manipulate the relative markedness of NPs. In addition, case markings of the…
Wilson, Stephen M; DeMarco, Andrew T; Henry, Maya L; Gesierich, Benno; Babiak, Miranda; Mandelli, Maria Luisa; Miller, Bruce L; Gorno-Tempini, Maria Luisa
2014-05-01
Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies have implicated the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in sentence-level processing, with syntactic structure-building and/or combinatorial semantic processing suggested as possible roles. A potential challenge to the view that the ATL is involved in syntactic aspects of sentence processing comes from the clinical syndrome of semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (semantic PPA; also known as semantic dementia). In semantic PPA, bilateral neurodegeneration of the ATLs is associated with profound lexical semantic deficits, yet syntax is strikingly spared. The goal of this study was to investigate the neural correlates of syntactic processing in semantic PPA to determine which regions normally involved in syntactic processing are damaged in semantic PPA and whether spared syntactic processing depends on preserved functionality of intact regions, preserved functionality of atrophic regions, or compensatory functional reorganization. We scanned 20 individuals with semantic PPA and 24 age-matched controls using structural MRI and fMRI. Participants performed a sentence comprehension task that emphasized syntactic processing and minimized lexical semantic demands. We found that, in controls, left inferior frontal and left posterior temporal regions were modulated by syntactic processing, whereas anterior temporal regions were not significantly modulated. In the semantic PPA group, atrophy was most severe in the ATLs but extended to the posterior temporal regions involved in syntactic processing. Functional activity for syntactic processing was broadly similar in patients and controls; in particular, whole-brain analyses revealed no significant differences between patients and controls in the regions modulated by syntactic processing. The atrophic left ATL did show abnormal functionality in semantic PPA patients; however, this took the unexpected form of a failure to deactivate. Taken together, our findings indicate that spared syntactic processing in semantic PPA depends on preserved functionality of structurally intact left frontal regions and moderately atrophic left posterior temporal regions, but no functional reorganization was apparent as a consequence of anterior temporal atrophy and dysfunction. These results suggest that the role of the ATL in sentence processing is less likely to relate to syntactic structure-building and more likely to relate to higher-level processes such as combinatorial semantic processing.
Trudeau, Natacha; Sutton, Ann; Dagenais, Emmanuelle; de Broeck, Sophie; Morford, Jill
2007-10-01
This study investigated the impact of syntactic complexity and task demands on construction of utterances using picture communication symbols by participants from 3 age groups with no communication disorders. Participants were 30 children (7;0 [years;months] to 8;11), 30 teenagers (12;0 to 13;11), and 30 adults (18 years and above). All participants constructed graphic symbol utterances to describe photographs presented with spoken French stimuli. Stimuli included simple and complex (object relative and subject relative) utterances describing the photographs, which were presented either 1 at a time (neutral condition) or in an array of 4 (contrast condition). Simple utterances lead to more uniform response patterns than complex utterances. Among complex utterances, subject relative sentences appeared more difficult to convey. Increasing the need for message clarity (i.e., contrast condition) elicited changes in the production of graphic symbol sequences for complex propositions. The effects of syntactic complexity and task demands were more pronounced for children. Graphic symbol utterance construction appears to involve more than simply transferring spoken language skills. One possible explanation is that this type of task requires higher levels of metalinguistic ability. Clinical implications and directions for further research are discussed.
Lexical and Syntactic Influences on Structural Selection in Language Production
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Frazer, Alexandra Kate
2016-01-01
We still know surprisingly little about how grammatical structures are selected for use in sentence production. A major debate concerns whether structural selection is competitive or noncompetitive. Competitive accounts propose that alternative structures or structural components actively suppress one another's activation until one option reaches…
Context updating during sentence comprehension: the effect of aboutness topic.
Burmester, Juliane; Spalek, Katharina; Wartenburger, Isabell
2014-10-01
To communicate efficiently, speakers typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and adapt their utterances to the listener's discourse representation. Information structure describes how linguistic information is packaged within a discourse to optimize information transfer. The present study investigates the nature and time course of context integration (i.e., aboutness topic vs. neutral context) on the comprehension of German declarative sentences with either subject-before-object (SO) or object-before-subject (OS) word order using offline comprehensibility judgments and online event-related potentials (ERPs). Comprehensibility judgments revealed that the topic context selectively facilitated comprehension of stories containing OS (i.e., non-canonical) sentences. In the ERPs, the topic context effect was reflected in a less pronounced late positivity at the sentence-initial object. In line with the Syntax-Discourse Model, we argue that these context-induced effects are attributable to reduced processing costs for updating the current discourse model. The results support recent approaches of neurocognitive models of discourse processing. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Modeling the development of written language
Puranik, Cynthia S.; Foorman, Barbara; Foster, Elizabeth; Wilson, Laura Gehron; Tschinkel, Erika; Kantor, Patricia Thatcher
2011-01-01
Alternative models of the structure of individual and developmental differences of written composition and handwriting fluency were tested using confirmatory factor analysis of writing samples provided by first- and fourth-grade students. For both groups, a five-factor model provided the best fit to the data. Four of the factors represented aspects of written composition: macro-organization (use of top sentence and number and ordering of ideas), productivity (number and diversity of words used), complexity (mean length of T-unit and syntactic density), and spelling and punctuation. The fifth factor represented handwriting fluency. Handwriting fluency was correlated with written composition factors at both grades. The magnitude of developmental differences between first grade and fourth grade expressed as effect sizes varied for variables representing the five constructs: large effect sizes were found for productivity and handwriting fluency variables; moderate effect sizes were found for complexity and macro-organization variables; and minimal effect sizes were found for spelling and punctuation variables. PMID:22228924
Drug side effect extraction from clinical narratives of psychiatry and psychology patients
Kocher, Jean-Pierre A; Chute, Christopher G; Savova, Guergana K
2011-01-01
Objective To extract physician-asserted drug side effects from electronic medical record clinical narratives. Materials and methods Pattern matching rules were manually developed through examining keywords and expression patterns of side effects to discover an individual side effect and causative drug relationship. A combination of machine learning (C4.5) using side effect keyword features and pattern matching rules was used to extract sentences that contain side effect and causative drug pairs, enabling the system to discover most side effect occurrences. Our system was implemented as a module within the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System. Results The system was tested in the domain of psychiatry and psychology. The rule-based system extracting side effects and causative drugs produced an F score of 0.80 (0.55 excluding allergy section). The hybrid system identifying side effect sentences had an F score of 0.75 (0.56 excluding allergy section) but covered more side effect and causative drug pairs than individual side effect extraction. Discussion The rule-based system was able to identify most side effects expressed by clear indication words. More sophisticated semantic processing is required to handle complex side effect descriptions in the narrative. We demonstrated that our system can be trained to identify sentences with complex side effect descriptions that can be submitted to a human expert for further abstraction. Conclusion Our system was able to extract most physician-asserted drug side effects. It can be used in either an automated mode for side effect extraction or semi-automated mode to identify side effect sentences that can significantly simplify abstraction by a human expert. PMID:21946242
Motyer, R E; Liddy, S; Torreggiani, W C; Buckley, O
2016-11-01
Voice recognition (VR) dictation of radiology reports has become the mainstay of reporting in many institutions worldwide. Despite benefit, such software is not without limitations, and transcription errors have been widely reported. Evaluate the frequency and nature of non-clinical transcription error using VR dictation software. Retrospective audit of 378 finalised radiology reports. Errors were counted and categorised by significance, error type and sub-type. Data regarding imaging modality, report length and dictation time was collected. 67 (17.72 %) reports contained ≥1 errors, with 7 (1.85 %) containing 'significant' and 9 (2.38 %) containing 'very significant' errors. A total of 90 errors were identified from the 378 reports analysed, with 74 (82.22 %) classified as 'insignificant', 7 (7.78 %) as 'significant', 9 (10 %) as 'very significant'. 68 (75.56 %) errors were 'spelling and grammar', 20 (22.22 %) 'missense' and 2 (2.22 %) 'nonsense'. 'Punctuation' error was most common sub-type, accounting for 27 errors (30 %). Complex imaging modalities had higher error rates per report and sentence. Computed tomography contained 0.040 errors per sentence compared to plain film with 0.030. Longer reports had a higher error rate, with reports >25 sentences containing an average of 1.23 errors per report compared to 0-5 sentences containing 0.09. These findings highlight the limitations of VR dictation software. While most error was deemed insignificant, there were occurrences of error with potential to alter report interpretation and patient management. Longer reports and reports on more complex imaging had higher error rates and this should be taken into account by the reporting radiologist.
Extracting numeric measurements and temporal coordinates from Japanese radiological reports
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Imai, Takeshi; Onogi, Yuzo
2004-04-01
Medical records are written mainly, in natural language. The focus of this study is narrative radiological reports written in natural Japanese. These reports cannot be used for advanced retrieval, data mining, and so on, unless they are stored, using a structured format such as DICOM-SR. The goal is to structure narrative reports progressively, using natural language processing (NLP). Structure has many different levels, for example, DICOM-SR has three established levels -- basic text, enhanced and comprehensive. At the enhanced level, it is necessary to use numerical measurements and spatial & temporal coordinates. In this study, the wording used in the reports was first standardized, dictionaries were organized, and morphological analysis performed. Next, numerical measurements and temporal coordinates were extracted, and the objects to which they referred, analyzed. 10,000 CT and MR reports were separated into 82,122 sentences, and 34,269 of the 36,444 numerical descriptions were tagged. Periods, slashes, hyphens, and parentheses are ambiguously used in the description of enumerated lists, dates, image numbers, and anatomical names, as well as at the end of sentences; to resolve this ambiguity, descriptions were processed, according to the order -- date, size, unit, enumerated list, and abbreviation -- then, the tagged reports were separated into sentences.
A multimodal parallel architecture: A cognitive framework for multimodal interactions.
Cohn, Neil
2016-01-01
Human communication is naturally multimodal, and substantial focus has examined the semantic correspondences in speech-gesture and text-image relationships. However, visual narratives, like those in comics, provide an interesting challenge to multimodal communication because the words and/or images can guide the overall meaning, and both modalities can appear in complicated "grammatical" sequences: sentences use a syntactic structure and sequential images use a narrative structure. These dual structures create complexity beyond those typically addressed by theories of multimodality where only a single form uses combinatorial structure, and also poses challenges for models of the linguistic system that focus on single modalities. This paper outlines a broad theoretical framework for multimodal interactions by expanding on Jackendoff's (2002) parallel architecture for language. Multimodal interactions are characterized in terms of their component cognitive structures: whether a particular modality (verbal, bodily, visual) is present, whether it uses a grammatical structure (syntax, narrative), and whether it "dominates" the semantics of the overall expression. Altogether, this approach integrates multimodal interactions into an existing framework of language and cognition, and characterizes interactions between varying complexity in the verbal, bodily, and graphic domains. The resulting theoretical model presents an expanded consideration of the boundaries of the "linguistic" system and its involvement in multimodal interactions, with a framework that can benefit research on corpus analyses, experimentation, and the educational benefits of multimodality. Copyright © 2015.
1985-09-01
appropriately, known as Paragraph Completion Test) (both requiring subjects to respond with several * sentences to presented conflict dilemmas ), along with...to better integrate and differentiate complex information. * Procedure: A literature review in the area of cognitive complexity is presented . The...treated in an overview fashion, and more detailed reviews of post- 1977 studies are then presented . This review updates the previous major review in this
Özgür, Arzucan; Hur, Junguk; He, Yongqun
2016-01-01
The Interaction Network Ontology (INO) logically represents biological interactions, pathways, and networks. INO has been demonstrated to be valuable in providing a set of structured ontological terms and associated keywords to support literature mining of gene-gene interactions from biomedical literature. However, previous work using INO focused on single keyword matching, while many interactions are represented with two or more interaction keywords used in combination. This paper reports our extension of INO to include combinatory patterns of two or more literature mining keywords co-existing in one sentence to represent specific INO interaction classes. Such keyword combinations and related INO interaction type information could be automatically obtained via SPARQL queries, formatted in Excel format, and used in an INO-supported SciMiner, an in-house literature mining program. We studied the gene interaction sentences from the commonly used benchmark Learning Logic in Language (LLL) dataset and one internally generated vaccine-related dataset to identify and analyze interaction types containing multiple keywords. Patterns obtained from the dependency parse trees of the sentences were used to identify the interaction keywords that are related to each other and collectively represent an interaction type. The INO ontology currently has 575 terms including 202 terms under the interaction branch. The relations between the INO interaction types and associated keywords are represented using the INO annotation relations: 'has literature mining keywords' and 'has keyword dependency pattern'. The keyword dependency patterns were generated via running the Stanford Parser to obtain dependency relation types. Out of the 107 interactions in the LLL dataset represented with two-keyword interaction types, 86 were identified by using the direct dependency relations. The LLL dataset contained 34 gene regulation interaction types, each of which associated with multiple keywords. A hierarchical display of these 34 interaction types and their ancestor terms in INO resulted in the identification of specific gene-gene interaction patterns from the LLL dataset. The phenomenon of having multi-keyword interaction types was also frequently observed in the vaccine dataset. By modeling and representing multiple textual keywords for interaction types, the extended INO enabled the identification of complex biological gene-gene interactions represented with multiple keywords.
Processing distinct linguistic information types in working memory in aphasia.
Wright, Heather Harris; Downey, Ryan A; Gravier, Michelle; Love, Tracy; Shapiro, Lewis P
2007-06-01
BACKGROUND: Recent investigations have suggested that adults with aphasia present with a working memory deficit that may contribute to their language-processing difficulties. Working memory capacity has been conceptualised as a single "resource" pool for attentional, linguistic, and other executive processing-alternatively, it has been suggested that there may be separate working memory abilities for different types of linguistic information. A challenge in this line of research is developing an appropriate measure of working memory ability in adults with aphasia. One candidate measure of working memory ability that may be appropriate for this population is the n-back task. By manipulating stimulus type, the n-back task may be appropriate for tapping linguistic-specific working memory abilities. AIMS: The purposes of this study were (a) to measure working memory ability in adults with aphasia for processing specific types of linguistic information, and (b) to examine whether a relationship exists between participants' performance on working memory and auditory comprehension measures. METHOD #ENTITYSTARTX00026; PROCEDURES: Nine adults with aphasia participated in the study. Participants completed three n-back tasks, each tapping different types of linguistic information. They included the PhonoBack (phonological level), SemBack (semantic level), and SynBack (syntactic level). For all tasks, two n-back levels were administered: a 1-back and 2-back. Each level contained 20 target items; accuracy was recorded by stimulus presentation software. The Subject-relative, Object-relative, Active, Passive Test of Syntactic Complexity (SOAP) was the syntactic sentence comprehension task administered to all participants. OUTCOMES #ENTITYSTARTX00026; RESULTS: Participants' performance declined as n-back task difficulty increased. Overall, participants performed better on the SemBack than PhonoBack and SynBack tasks, but the differences were not statistically significant. Finally, participants who performed poorly on the SynBack also had more difficulty comprehending syntactically complex sentence structures (i.e., passive & object-relative sentences). CONCLUSIONS: Results indicate that working memory ability for different types of linguistic information can be measured in adults with aphasia. Further, our results add to the growing literature that favours separate working memory abilities for different types of linguistic information view.
ERP evidence for telicity effects on syntactic processing in garden-path sentences
Malaia, Evguenia; Wilbur, Ronnie B.; Weber-Fox, Christine
2009-01-01
Verbs contain multifaceted information about both the semantics of an action, and potential argument structures. Linguistic theory classifies verbs according to whether the denoted action has an inherent (telic) end-point (fall, awaken), or whether it is considered homogenous, or atelic (read, worship). The aim of our study was to examine how this distinction influences online sentence processing, investigating the effects of verbal telicity on the ease of syntactic re-analysis of Object reduced relative clauses. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 22 English speakers as they read sentences in which the main verb was either telic or atelic, e.g., “The actress awakened/worshippedby the writer left in a hurry”. ERPs elicited by telic and atelic verbs, the preposition “by” introducing the second argument (Agent), and the second argument itself, e.g., “writer”, were compared. Additionally, participants were grouped according to receptive syntactic proficiency: normal (NP) or high (HP). ERPs from the NP group first diverged at the second argument, with the atelic condition eliciting larger amplitude negativity at the N100, and continuing to the P200 interval. In contrast, ERPs from the HP group first diverged earlier in the sentence, on the word “by”. ERPs elicited by “by” in the atelic condition were also characterized by increased negativity, in this case significant at P200 and Anterior Negativity between 320-500ms post stimulus onset. Our results support the postulated conceptual/semantic distinction underlying the two verb categories, and demonstrate that world-knowledge about actions designated by verbs and syntactic proficiency are reflected in on-line processing of sentence structure. PMID:18945484
Straube, Benjamin; Meyer, Lea; Green, Antonia; Kircher, Tilo
2014-06-03
Speech-associated gesturing leads to memory advantages for spoken sentences. However, unexpected or surprising events are also likely to be remembered. With this study we test the hypothesis that different neural mechanisms (semantic elaboration and surprise) lead to memory advantages for iconic and unrelated gestures. During fMRI-data acquisition participants were presented with video clips of an actor verbalising concrete sentences accompanied by iconic gestures (IG; e.g., circular gesture; sentence: "The man is sitting at the round table"), unrelated free gestures (FG; e.g., unrelated up down movements; same sentence) and no gestures (NG; same sentence). After scanning, recognition performance for the three conditions was tested. Videos were evaluated regarding semantic relation and surprise by a different group of participants. The semantic relationship between speech and gesture was rated higher for IG (IG>FG), whereas surprise was rated higher for FG (FG>IG). Activation of the hippocampus correlated with subsequent memory performance of both gesture conditions (IG+FG>NG). For the IG condition we found activation in the left temporal pole and middle cingulate cortex (MCC; IG>FG). In contrast, for the FG condition posterior thalamic structures (FG>IG) as well as anterior and posterior cingulate cortices were activated (FG>NG). Our behavioral and fMRI-data suggest different mechanisms for processing related and unrelated co-verbal gestures, both of them leading to enhanced memory performance. Whereas activation in MCC and left temporal pole for iconic co-verbal gestures may reflect semantic memory processes, memory enhancement for unrelated gestures relies on the surprise response, mediated by anterior/posterior cingulate cortex and thalamico-hippocampal structures. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Grammatical verb aspect and event roles in sentence processing.
Madden-Lombardi, Carol; Dominey, Peter Ford; Ventre-Dominey, Jocelyne
2017-01-01
Two experiments examine how grammatical verb aspect constrains our understanding of events. According to linguistic theory, an event described in the perfect aspect (John had opened the bottle) should evoke a mental representation of a finished event with focus on the resulting object, whereas an event described in the imperfective aspect (John was opening the bottle) should evoke a representation of the event as ongoing, including all stages of the event, and focusing all entities relevant to the ongoing action (instruments, objects, agents, locations, etc.). To test this idea, participants saw rebus sentences in the perfect and imperfective aspect, presented one word at a time, self-paced. In each sentence, the instrument and the recipient of the action were replaced by pictures (John was using/had used a *corkscrew* to open the *bottle* at the restaurant). Time to process the two images as well as speed and accuracy on sensibility judgments were measured. Although experimental sentences always made sense, half of the object and instrument pictures did not match the temporal constraints of the verb. For instance, in perfect sentences aspect-congruent trials presented an image of the corkscrew closed (no longer in-use) and the wine bottle fully open. The aspect-incongruent yet still sensible versions either replaced the corkscrew with an in-use corkscrew (open, in-hand) or the bottle image with a half-opened bottle. In this case, the participant would still respond "yes", but with longer expected response times. A three-way interaction among Verb Aspect, Sentence Role, and Temporal Match on image processing times showed that participants were faster to process images that matched rather than mismatched the aspect of the verb, especially for resulting objects in perfect sentences. A second experiment replicated and extended the results to confirm that this was not due to the placement of the object in the sentence. These two experiments extend previous research, showing how verb aspect drives not only the temporal structure of event representation, but also the focus on specific roles of the event. More generally, the findings of visual match during online sentence-picture processing are consistent with theories of perceptual simulation.
Grammatical verb aspect and event roles in sentence processing
Madden-Lombardi, Carol; Dominey, Peter Ford; Ventre-Dominey, Jocelyne
2017-01-01
Two experiments examine how grammatical verb aspect constrains our understanding of events. According to linguistic theory, an event described in the perfect aspect (John had opened the bottle) should evoke a mental representation of a finished event with focus on the resulting object, whereas an event described in the imperfective aspect (John was opening the bottle) should evoke a representation of the event as ongoing, including all stages of the event, and focusing all entities relevant to the ongoing action (instruments, objects, agents, locations, etc.). To test this idea, participants saw rebus sentences in the perfect and imperfective aspect, presented one word at a time, self-paced. In each sentence, the instrument and the recipient of the action were replaced by pictures (John was using/had used a *corkscrew* to open the *bottle* at the restaurant). Time to process the two images as well as speed and accuracy on sensibility judgments were measured. Although experimental sentences always made sense, half of the object and instrument pictures did not match the temporal constraints of the verb. For instance, in perfect sentences aspect-congruent trials presented an image of the corkscrew closed (no longer in-use) and the wine bottle fully open. The aspect-incongruent yet still sensible versions either replaced the corkscrew with an in-use corkscrew (open, in-hand) or the bottle image with a half-opened bottle. In this case, the participant would still respond “yes”, but with longer expected response times. A three-way interaction among Verb Aspect, Sentence Role, and Temporal Match on image processing times showed that participants were faster to process images that matched rather than mismatched the aspect of the verb, especially for resulting objects in perfect sentences. A second experiment replicated and extended the results to confirm that this was not due to the placement of the object in the sentence. These two experiments extend previous research, showing how verb aspect drives not only the temporal structure of event representation, but also the focus on specific roles of the event. More generally, the findings of visual match during online sentence-picture processing are consistent with theories of perceptual simulation. PMID:29287091
Brandt, Silke; Lieven, Elena; Tomasello, Michael
2016-01-01
ABSTRACT Children and adults follow cues such as case marking and word order in their assignment of semantic roles in simple transitives (e.g., the dog chased the cat). It has been suggested that the same cues are used for the interpretation of complex sentences, such as transitive relative clauses (RCs) (e.g., that’s the dog that chased the cat) (Bates, Devescovi, & D’Amico, 1999). We used a pointing paradigm to test German-speaking 3-, 4-, and 6-year-old children’s sensitivity to case marking and word order in their interpretation of simple transitives and transitive RCs. In Experiment 1, case marking was ambiguous. The only cue available was word order. In Experiment 2, case was marked on lexical NPs or demonstrative pronouns. In Experiment 3, case was marked on lexical NPs or personal pronouns. Whereas the younger children mainly followed word order, the older children were more likely to base their interpretations on the more reliable case-marking cue. In most cases, children from both age groups were more likely to use these cues in their interpretation of simple transitives than in their interpretation of transitive RCs. Finally, children paid more attention to nominative case when it was marked on first-person personal pronouns than when it was marked on third-person lexical NPs or demonstrative pronouns, such as der Löwe ‘the-NOM lion’ or der ‘he-NOM.’ They were able to successfully integrate this case-marking cue in their sentence processing even when it appeared late in the sentence. We discuss four potential reasons for these differences across development, constructions, and lexical items. (1) Older children are relatively more sensitive to cue reliability. (2) Word order is more reliable in simple transitives than in transitive RCs. (3) The processing of case marking might initially be item-specific. (4) The processing of case marking might depend on its saliency and position in the sentence. PMID:27019652
Language comprehension in children, adolescents, and adults with Down syndrome.
Witecy, Bernadette; Penke, Martina
2017-03-01
There is conflicting evidence as to whether receptive language abilities of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) continue to improve into adulthood, reach a plateau in late adolescence, or even start to decline. The study aims to shed light on the question whether receptive syntactic skills change from childhood/adolescence to adulthood and provides a detailed qualitative analysis of the receptive abilities of adults with DS. 58 individuals with DS participated in the study: 31 children/adolescents (aged: 4;6-19;0 years) and 27 adults (aged: 20;8-40;3 years). They completed measures of grammar comprehension, nonverbal cognition, and phonological working memory. There was no significant correlation between comprehension performance and chronological age in the overall sample. Separate correlational analyses for the subgroups of children/adolescents and adults yielded a significant positive result for the former subgroup but not for the latter. We also found significant positive correlations between grammar comprehension scores and nonverbal mental age as well as measures of phonological working memory. Qualitative analyses showed various limitations in the receptive syntactic abilities of adults with DS. Difficulties increase with sentence length and grammatical complexity, but are also apparent in simple sentences. The results suggest that syntactic comprehension abilities of individuals with DS continue to improve through childhood and adolescence and that thereafter a plateau is reached and maintained. Language comprehension in adults with DS is impaired for a variety of grammatical structures and receptive performance seems to be related to nonverbal cognitive abilities, phonological working memory, and grammatical complexity. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Takano, Wataru; Kusajima, Ikuo; Nakamura, Yoshihiko
2016-08-01
It is desirable for robots to be able to linguistically understand human actions during human-robot interactions. Previous research has developed frameworks for encoding human full body motion into model parameters and for classifying motion into specific categories. For full understanding, the motion categories need to be connected to the natural language such that the robots can interpret human motions as linguistic expressions. This paper proposes a novel framework for integrating observation of human motion with that of natural language. This framework consists of two models; the first model statistically learns the relations between motions and their relevant words, and the second statistically learns sentence structures as word n-grams. Integration of these two models allows robots to generate sentences from human motions by searching for words relevant to the motion using the first model and then arranging these words in appropriate order using the second model. This allows making sentences that are the most likely to be generated from the motion. The proposed framework was tested on human full body motion measured by an optical motion capture system. In this, descriptive sentences were manually attached to the motions, and the validity of the system was demonstrated. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Pauker, Efrat; Itzhak, Inbal; Baum, Shari R; Steinhauer, Karsten
2011-10-01
In reading, a comma in the wrong place can cause more severe misunderstandings than the lack of a required comma. Here, we used ERPs to demonstrate that a similar effect holds for prosodic boundaries in spoken language. Participants judged the acceptability of temporarily ambiguous English "garden path" sentences whose prosodic boundaries were either in line or in conflict with the actual syntactic structure. Sentences with incongruent boundaries were accepted less than those with missing boundaries and elicited a stronger on-line brain response in ERPs (N400/P600 components). Our results support the notion that mentally deleting an overt prosodic boundary is more costly than postulating a new one and extend previous findings, suggesting an immediate role of prosody in sentence comprehension. Importantly, our study also provides new details on the profile and temporal dynamics of the closure positive shift (CPS), an ERP component assumed to reflect prosodic phrasing in speech and music in real time. We show that the CPS is reliably elicited at the onset of prosodic boundaries in English sentences and is preceded by negative components. Its early onset distinguishes the speech CPS in adults both from prosodic ERP correlates in infants and from the "music CPS" previously reported for trained musicians.
Dependency Distance Differences across Interpreting Types: Implications for Cognitive Demand
Liang, Junying; Fang, Yuanyuan; Lv, Qianxi; Liu, Haitao
2017-01-01
Interpreting is generally recognized as a particularly demanding language processing task for the cognitive system. Dependency distance, the linear distance between two syntactically related words in a sentence, is an index of sentence complexity and is also able to reflect the cognitive constraints during various tasks. In the current research, we examine the difference in dependency distance among three interpreting types, namely, simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting and read-out translated speech based on a treebank comprising these types of interpreting output texts with dependency annotation. Results show that different interpreting renditions yield different dependency distances, and consecutive interpreting texts entail the smallest dependency distance other than those of simultaneous interpreting and read-out translated speech, suggesting that consecutive interpreting bears heavier cognitive demands than simultaneous interpreting. The current research suggests for the first time that interpreting is an extremely demanding cognitive task that can further mediate the dependency distance of output sentences. Such findings may be due to the minimization of dependency distance under cognitive constraints. PMID:29312027
de Araújo Vilhena, Douglas; Sucena, Ana; Castro, São Luís; Pinheiro, Ângela Maria Vieira
2016-02-01
Our aim was to analyse the linguistic structure of the Lobrot's Lecture 3 (L3) reading test and to describe the procedure for its adaptation to a Brazilian cultural-linguistic context. The resulting adapted version is called the Reading Test-Sentence Comprehension [Teste de Leitura: Compreensão de Sentenças (TELCS)] and was developed using the European Portuguese adaptation of L3 as a reference. The present study was conducted in seven steps: (1) classification of the response alternatives of L3 test; (2) adaptation of the original sentences into Brazilian Portuguese; (3) back-translation; (4) adaptation of the distractors from TELCS; (5) configuration of TELCS; (6) pilot study; and (7) validation and standardization. In comparison with L3, TELCS included new linguistic and structural variables, such as frequency of occurrence of the distractors, gender neutrality and position of the target words. The instrument can be used for a collective screening or individual clinical administration purposes to evaluate the reading ability of second-to-fifth-grade and 7-to-11-year-old students. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Lum, Kristian; Swarup, Samarth; Eubank, Stephen; Hawdon, James
2014-09-06
We build an agent-based model of incarceration based on the susceptible-infected-suspectible (SIS) model of infectious disease propagation. Our central hypothesis is that the observed racial disparities in incarceration rates between Black and White Americans can be explained as the result of differential sentencing between the two demographic groups. We demonstrate that if incarceration can be spread through a social influence network, then even relatively small differences in sentencing can result in large disparities in incarceration rates. Controlling for effects of transmissibility, susceptibility and influence network structure, our model reproduces the observed large disparities in incarceration rates given the differences in sentence lengths for White and Black drug offenders in the USA without extensive parameter tuning. We further establish the suitability of the SIS model as applied to incarceration by demonstrating that the observed structural patterns of recidivism are an emergent property of the model. In fact, our model shows a remarkably close correspondence with California incarceration data. This work advances efforts to combine the theories and methods of epidemiology and criminology.
Bunger, Ann; Papafragou, Anna; Trueswell, John C.
2013-01-01
This priming study investigates the role of conceptual structure during language production, probing whether English speakers are sensitive to the structure of the event encoded by a prime sentence. In two experiments, participants read prime sentences aloud before describing motion events. Primes differed in 1) syntactic frame, 2) degree of lexical and conceptual overlap with target events, and 3) distribution of event components within frames. Results demonstrate that conceptual overlap between primes and targets led to priming of (a) the information that speakers chose to include in their descriptions of target events, (b) the way that information was mapped to linguistic elements, and (c) the syntactic structures that were built to communicate that information. When there was no conceptual overlap between primes and targets, priming was not successful. We conclude that conceptual structure is a level of representation activated during priming, and that it has implications for both Message Planning and Linguistic Formulation. PMID:24072953
Wilson, Stephen M.; DeMarco, Andrew T.; Henry, Maya L.; Gesierich, Benno; Babiak, Miranda; Mandelli, Maria Luisa; Miller, Bruce L.; Gorno-Tempini, Maria Luisa
2014-01-01
Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies have implicated the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in sentence-level processing, with syntactic structure-building and/or combinatorial semantic processing suggested as possible roles. A potential challenge to the view that the ATL is involved in syntactic aspects of sentence processing comes from the clinical syndrome of semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (semantic PPA, also known as semantic dementia). In semantic PPA, bilateral neurodegeneration of the anterior temporal lobes is associated with profound lexical semantic deficits, yet syntax is strikingly spared. The goal of this study was to investigate the neural correlates of syntactic processing in semantic PPA, in order to determine which regions normally involved in syntactic processing are damaged in semantic PPA, and whether spared syntactic processing depends on preserved functionality of intact regions, preserved functionality of atrophic regions, or compensatory functional reorganization. We scanned 20 individuals with semantic PPA and 24 age-matched controls using structural and functional MRI. Participants performed a sentence comprehension task that emphasized syntactic processing and minimized lexical semantic demands. We found that in controls, left inferior frontal and left posterior temporal regions were modulated by syntactic processing, while anterior temporal regions were not significantly modulated. In the semantic PPA group, atrophy was most severe in the anterior temporal lobes, but extended to the posterior temporal regions involved in syntactic processing. Functional activity for syntactic processing was broadly similar in patients and controls; in particular, whole-brain analyses revealed no significant differences between patients and controls in the regions modulated by syntactic processing. The atrophic left anterior temporal lobe did show abnormal functionality in semantic PPA patients, however this took the unexpected form of a failure to deactivate. Taken together, our findings indicate that spared syntactic processing in semantic PPA depends on preserved functionality of structurally intact left frontal regions and moderately atrophic left posterior temporal regions, but no functional reorganization was apparent as a consequence of anterior temporal atrophy and dysfunction. These results suggest that the role of the anterior temporal lobe in sentence processing is less likely to relate to syntactic structure-building, and more likely to relate to higher level processes such as combinatorial semantic processing. PMID:24345172
Holaday, M; Smith, D A; Sherry, A
2000-06-01
Test usage surveys consistently find that sentence completion tests (SCTs) are among the most popular personality assessment instruments used by practitioners. What is not noted is which SCTs practitioners are using, why these tests are so popular, and whether practitioners are using formal scoring. We surveyed a random selection of 100 members of the Society for Personality Assessment. With a 60% return rate on a single mailing, we found that most psychologists who use incomplete sentence tests use the Rotter (1951) Incomplete Sentences Blank with children (18%), adolescents (32%), and adults (47%). Most practitioners said they do not read stems aloud and record answers themselves, and even fewer said they use formal scoring. The most common reasons for using an SCT are (a) to use it as part of an assessment battery (41 endorsements), (b) to determine personality structure (18 endorsements), and (c) to elicit quotable quotes (17 endorsements). Implications for practitioners and training suggestions for academicians who prepare future psychologists are noted.
Ye, Zheng; Doñamayor, Nuria; Münte, Thomas F
2014-02-01
A set of cortical and sub-cortical brain structures has been linked with sentence-level semantic processes. However, it remains unclear how these brain regions are organized to support the semantic integration of a word into sentential context. To look into this issue, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that required participants to silently read sentences with semantically congruent or incongruent endings and analyzed the network properties of the brain with two approaches, independent component analysis (ICA) and graph theoretical analysis (GTA). The GTA suggested that the whole-brain network is topologically stable across conditions. The ICA revealed a network comprising the supplementary motor area (SMA), left inferior frontal gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, left caudate nucleus, and left angular gyrus, which was modulated by the incongruity of sentence ending. Furthermore, the GTA specified that the connections between the left SMA and left caudate nucleus as well as that between the left caudate nucleus and right thalamus were stronger in response to incongruent vs. congruent endings. Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Perceptual organization of speech signals by children with and without dyslexia
Nittrouer, Susan; Lowenstein, Joanna H.
2013-01-01
Developmental dyslexia is a condition in which children encounter difficulty learning to read in spite of adequate instruction. Although considerable effort has been expended trying to identify the source of the problem, no single solution has been agreed upon. The current study explored a new hypothesis, that developmental dyslexia may be due to faulty perceptual organization of linguistically relevant sensory input. To test that idea, sentence-length speech signals were processed to create either sine-wave or noise-vocoded analogs. Seventy children between 8 and 11 years of age, with and without dyslexia participated. Children with dyslexia were selected to have phonological awareness deficits, although those without such deficits were retained in the study. The processed sentences were presented for recognition, and measures of reading, phonological awareness, and expressive vocabulary were collected. Results showed that children with dyslexia, regardless of phonological subtype, had poorer recognition scores than children without dyslexia for both kinds of degraded sentences. Older children with dyslexia recognized the sine-wave sentences better than younger children with dyslexia, but no such effect of age was found for the vocoded materials. Recognition scores were used as predictor variables in regression analyses with reading, phonological awareness, and vocabulary measures used as dependent variables. Scores for both sorts of sentence materials were strong predictors of performance on all three dependent measures when all children were included, but only performance for the sine-wave materials explained significant proportions of variance when only children with dyslexia were included. Finally, matching young, typical readers with older children with dyslexia on reading abilities did not mitigate the group difference in recognition of vocoded sentences. Conclusions were that children with dyslexia have difficulty organizing linguistically relevant sensory input, but learn to do so for the structure preserved by sine-wave signals before they do so for other sorts of signal structure. These perceptual organization deficits could account for difficulties acquiring refined linguistic representations, including those of a phonological nature, although ramifications are different across affected children. PMID:23702597
Perceptual organization of speech signals by children with and without dyslexia.
Nittrouer, Susan; Lowenstein, Joanna H
2013-08-01
Developmental dyslexia is a condition in which children encounter difficulty learning to read in spite of adequate instruction. Although considerable effort has been expended trying to identify the source of the problem, no single solution has been agreed upon. The current study explored a new hypothesis, that developmental dyslexia may be due to faulty perceptual organization of linguistically relevant sensory input. To test that idea, sentence-length speech signals were processed to create either sine-wave or noise-vocoded analogs. Seventy children between 8 and 11 years of age, with and without dyslexia participated. Children with dyslexia were selected to have phonological awareness deficits, although those without such deficits were retained in the study. The processed sentences were presented for recognition, and measures of reading, phonological awareness, and expressive vocabulary were collected. Results showed that children with dyslexia, regardless of phonological subtype, had poorer recognition scores than children without dyslexia for both kinds of degraded sentences. Older children with dyslexia recognized the sine-wave sentences better than younger children with dyslexia, but no such effect of age was found for the vocoded materials. Recognition scores were used as predictor variables in regression analyses with reading, phonological awareness, and vocabulary measures used as dependent variables. Scores for both sorts of sentence materials were strong predictors of performance on all three dependent measures when all children were included, but only performance for the sine-wave materials explained significant proportions of variance when only children with dyslexia were included. Finally, matching young, typical readers with older children with dyslexia on reading abilities did not mitigate the group difference in recognition of vocoded sentences. Conclusions were that children with dyslexia have difficulty organizing linguistically relevant sensory input, but learn to do so for the structure preserved by sine-wave signals before they do so for other sorts of signal structure. These perceptual organization deficits could account for difficulties acquiring refined linguistic representations, including those of a phonological nature, although ramifications are different across affected children. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Recent Developments in Transformational Grammar.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Jacobs, Roderick A.
1969-01-01
In the years following the appearance of Noam Chomsky's book, "Syntactic Structures," in 1957, transformational grammarians modified and improved his initial model of language. The notion of a deep structure of meaning underlying a sentence's surface structure was revised to embody elements representing negation, command, and interrogation, and to…
Persistent Structural Priming from Language Comprehension to Language Production
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Bock, Kathryn; Dell, Gary S.; Chang, Franklin; Onishi, Kristine H.
2007-01-01
To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit…
Remarques sur le Passif (suite) (Remarks on the Passive, Continued)
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Pinchon, Jacqueline
1977-01-01
The continuation of articles on the passive voice appearing in the "Grammaire vivante" section of the periodical. The production of the passive sentence is considered under two headings: the simple verb and the complex verbal group. (Text is in French.) (AMH)
Physics textbooks from the viewpoint of network structures
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Králiková, Petra; Teleki, Aba
2017-01-01
We can observe self-organized networks all around us. These networks are, in general, scale invariant networks described by the Bianconi-Barabasi model. The self-organized networks (networks formed naturally when feedback acts on the system) show certain universality. These networks, in simplified models, have scale invariant distribution (Pareto distribution type I) and parameter α has value between 2 and 5. The textbooks are extremely important in the learning process and from this reason we studied physics textbook at the level of sentences and physics terms (bipartite network). The nodes represent physics terms, sentences, and pictures, tables, connected by links (by physics terms and transitional words and transitional phrases). We suppose that learning process are more robust and goes faster and easier if the physics textbook has a structure similar to structures of self-organized networks.
Can thematic roles leave traces of their places?
Chang, Franklin; Bock, Kathryn; Goldberg, Adele E
2003-11-01
An important question in the study of language production is the nature of the semantic information that speakers use to create syntactic structures. A common answer to this question assumes that thematic roles help to mediate the mapping from messages to syntax. However, research using structural priming has suggested that the construction of syntactic frames may be insensitive to variations in thematic roles within messages (Cognition 35 (1990) 1; Psychological Review 99 (1992) 150). Because these studies involved structural alternations whose syntax covaries with the order of thematic roles, it is difficult to assess any independent contribution that role information may make to the positioning of phrases. In this study, we primed the order of the roles without changing the syntactic structure of the sentences produced, and found that the order of the roles was influenced by the priming manipulation. This implies that thematic roles or the features that differentiate them are active within the mapping between messages and sentence structures.
Structural Priming: A Critical Review
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Pickering, Martin J.; Ferreira, Victor S.
2008-01-01
Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…
Contrastive Analysis of Sentence Patterns in English and Persian
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hajizadeh, Reza
2011-01-01
Complements, adjuncts and predicator are the three main elements of the clause structure. This paper primarily aims at presenting a general classification of clause structure in Persian. In this context, transitive and intransitive structures in Modern Persian are also analyzed. In this research, five canonical Persian constructions are identified…
Equational Sentence Structure in Eskimo.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hofmann, Th. R.
A comparison of the syntactic characteristics of mathematical equations and Eskimo syntax is made, and a proposal that Eskimo has a level of structure similar to that of equations is described. P:t performative contrast is reanalyzed. Questions and speculations on the formal treatment of this type of structure in transformational grammar, and its…
Referent Predictability Is Affected by Syntactic Structure: Evidence from Chinese
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Cheng, Wei; Almor, Amit
2017-01-01
This paper examines the effect of syntactic structures on referent predictability. Focusing on stimulus-experiencer (SE) verbs, we conducted two sentence-completion experiments in Chinese by contrasting SE verbs in three structures (active canonical, active "ba," and passive). The results showed that although verb semantics and discourse…
Structured Natural-Language Descriptions for Semantic Content Retrieval of Visual Materials.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Tam, A. M.; Leung, C. H. C.
2001-01-01
Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…
Memory Effects in Syntactic ERP Tasks
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Sabourin, Laura; Stowe, Laurie
2004-01-01
The study presented here investigated the role of memory in normal sentence processing by looking at ERP effects to normal sentences and sentences containing grammatical violations. Sentences where the critical word was in the middle of the sentence were compared to sentences where the critical word always occurred in sentence-final position.…
A Semantic Constraint on Syntactic Parsing.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Crain, Stephen; Coker, Pamela L.
This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…
Structural Counterfactuals: A Brief Introduction
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Pearl, Judea
2013-01-01
Recent advances in causal reasoning have given rise to a computational model that emulates the process by which humans generate, evaluate, and distinguish counterfactual sentences. Contrasted with the "possible worlds" account of counterfactuals, this "structural" model enjoys the advantages of representational economy,…
Hsiao, Yaling; Gao, Yannan; MacDonald, Maryellen C.
2014-01-01
Interference effects from semantically similar items are well-known in studies of single word production, where the presence of semantically similar distractor words slows picture naming. This article examines the consequences of this interference in sentence production and tests the hypothesis that in situations of high similarity-based interference, producers are more likely to omit one of the interfering elements than when there is low semantic similarity and thus low interference. This work investigated language production in Mandarin, which allows subject noun phrases to be omitted in discourse contexts in which the subject entity has been previously mentioned in the discourse. We hypothesize that Mandarin speakers omit the subject more often when the subject and the object entities are conceptually similar. A corpus analysis of simple transitive sentences found higher rates of subject omission when both the subject and object were animate (potentially yielding similarity-based interference) than when the subject was animate and object was inanimate. A second study manipulated subject-object animacy in a picture description task and replicated this result: participants omitted the animate subject more often when the object was also animate than when it was inanimate. These results suggest that similarity-based interference affects sentence forms, particularly when the agent of the action is mentioned in the sentence. Alternatives and mechanisms for this effect are discussed. PMID:25278915
Retrosplenial Cortex Indexes Stability beyond the Spatial Domain
2018-01-01
Retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is highly responsive to landmarks in the environment that remain fixed in a permanent location, and this has been linked with its known involvement in scene and spatial processing. However, it is unclear whether RSC representations of permanence are a purely spatial phenomenon or whether they extend into behavioral and conceptual domains. To test this, during functional MRI scanning, we had people (males and females) read three different types of sentences that described either something permanent or transient. The first two sentence types were imageable, with a focus either on a spatial landmark or on an action. The third type of sentence involved non-imageable abstract concepts. We found that, in addition to being more active for sentences describing landmarks with a permanent location in space, RSC was also significantly engaged by sentences describing stable and consistent behaviors or actions, as long as they were rooted within a concrete imageable setting. RSC was not responsive to abstract concepts, even those that embodied the notion of stability. Similarly, it was not engaged by imageable sentences with transient contents. In contrast, parahippocampal cortex was more engaged by imageable sentences describing landmarks, whereas the hippocampus was active for all imageable sentences. In addition, for imageable sentences describing permanence, there was bidirectional functional coupling between RSC and these medial temporal lobe structures. It appears, therefore, that RSC-mediated permanence representations could be helpful for more than spatially mapping environments and may also provide information about the reliability of events occurring within them. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is known to process information about landmarks in the environment that have a fixed, permanent location. Here we tested whether this permanence response was apparent beyond the spatial domain, which could have implications for understanding the role of the RSC more widely across cognition. We found that the RSC was engaged not only by permanent landmarks but also by stable and consistent actions. It was not responsive to transient landmarks or actions or to abstract concepts, even those that embodied the notion of stability. We conclude that the RSC might do more than help to map spatial environments, by possibly also providing information about the reliability of events occurring within them. PMID:29311139
Retrieval Practice Benefits Deductive Inference
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Eglington, Luke G.; Kang, Sean H. K.
2018-01-01
Retrieval practice has been shown to benefit learning. However, the benefit has sometimes been attenuated with more complex materials that require integrating multiple units of information. Critically, Tran et al. "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22," 135-140 (2015) found that retrieval practice improves sentence memory but not the…
Individual Variation in the Late Positive Complex to Semantic Anomalies
Kos, Miriam; van den Brink, Danielle; Hagoort, Peter
2012-01-01
It is well-known that, within ERP paradigms of sentence processing, semantically anomalous words elicit N400 effects. Less clear, however, is what happens after the N400. In some cases N400 effects are followed by Late Positive Complexes (LPC), whereas in other cases such effects are lacking. We investigated several factors which could affect the LPC, such as contextual constraint, inter-individual variation, and working memory. Seventy-two participants read sentences containing a semantic manipulation (Whipped cream tastes sweet/anxious and creamy). Neither contextual constraint nor working memory correlated with the LPC. Inter-individual variation played a substantial role in the elicitation of the LPC with about half of the participants showing a negative response and the other half showing an LPC. This individual variation correlated with a syntactic ERP as well as an alternative semantic manipulation. In conclusion, our results show that inter-individual variation plays a large role in the elicitation of the LPC and this may account for the diversity in LPC findings in language research. PMID:22973249
The Relationship between Written Coherence and Thinking.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Goldstein, Elizabeth Odoroff
It was hypothesized that writers of sentence pairs with clear relationships would have better recall of second sentences than would writers of sentence pairs with unclear relationships. Clear connections between sentences in sentence pairs were defined as those sentences in which the language of the first sentence was explicitly picked up in the…
Linguistic and auditory temporal processing in children with specific language impairment.
Fortunato-Tavares, Talita; Rocha, Caroline Nunes; Andrade, Claudia Regina Furquim de; Befi-Lopes, Débora Maria; Schochat, Eliane; Hestvik, Arild; Schwartz, Richard G
2009-01-01
Several studies suggest the association of specific language impairment (SLI) to deficits in auditory processing. It has been evidenced that children with SLI present deficit in brief stimuli discrimination. Such deficit would lead to difficulties in developing phonological abilities necessary to map phonemes and to effectively and automatically code and decode words and sentences. However, the correlation between temporal processing (TP) and specific deficits in language disorders--such as syntactic comprehension abilities--has received little or no attention. To analyze the correlation between: TP (through the Frequency Pattern Test--FPT) and Syntactic Complexity Comprehension (through a Sentence Comprehension Task). Sixteen children with typical language development (8;9 +/- 1;1 years) and seven children with SLI (8;1 +/- 1;2 years) participated on the study. Accuracy of both groups decreased with the increase on syntactic complexity (both p < 0.01). On the between groups comparison, performance difference on the Test of Syntactic Complexity Comprehension (TSCC) was statistically significant (p = 0.02).As expected, children with SLI presented FPT performance outside reference values. On the SLI group, correlations between TSCC and FPT were positive and higher for high syntactic complexity (r = 0.97) than for low syntactic complexity (r = 0.51). Results suggest that FPT is positively correlated to syntactic complexity comprehension abilities.The low performance on FPT could serve as an additional indicator of deficits in complex linguistic processing. Future studies should consider, besides the increase of the sample, longitudinal studies that investigate the effect of frequency pattern auditory training on performance in high syntactic complexity comprehension tasks.
Parafoveal preview during reading: Effects of sentence position
White, Sarah J.; Warren, Tessa; Reichle, Erik D.
2011-01-01
Two experiments examined parafoveal preview for words located in the middle of sentences and at sentence boundaries. Parafoveal processing was shown to occur for words at sentence-initial, mid-sentence, and sentence-final positions. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed reduced effects of preview on regressions out for sentence-initial words. In addition, Experiment 2 showed reduced preview effects on first-pass reading times for sentence-initial words. These effects of sentence position on preview could result from reduced parafoveal processing for sentence-initial words, or other processes specific to word reading at sentence boundaries. In addition to the effects of preview, the experiments also demonstrate variability in the effects of sentence wrap-up on different reading measures, indicating that the presence and time course of wrap-up effects may be modulated by text-specific factors. We also report simulations of Experiment 2 using version 10 of E-Z Reader (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009), designed to explore the possible mechanisms underlying parafoveal preview at sentence boundaries. PMID:21500948
Li, Xiaoqing; Zhao, Haiyan; Lu, Yong
2014-01-01
Sentence comprehension involves timely computing different types of relations between its verbs and noun arguments, such as morphosyntactic, semantic, and thematic relations. Here, we used EEG technique to investigate the potential differences in thematic role computing and lexical-semantic relatedness processing during on-line sentence comprehension, and the interaction between these two types of processes. Mandarin Chinese sentences were used as materials. The basic structure of those sentences is “Noun+Verb+‘le’+a two-character word”, with the Noun being the initial argument. The verb disambiguates the initial argument as an agent or a patient. Meanwhile, the initial argument and the verb are highly or lowly semantically related. The ERPs at the verbs revealed that: relative to the agent condition, the patient condition evoked a larger N400 only when the argument and verb were lowly semantically related; however, relative to the high-relatedness condition, the low-relatedness condition elicited a larger N400 regardless of the thematic relation; although both thematic role variation and semantic relatedness variation elicited N400 effects, the N400 effect elicited by the former was broadly distributed and reached maximum over the frontal electrodes, and the N400 effect elicited by the latter had a posterior distribution. In addition, the brain oscillations results showed that, although thematic role variation (patient vs. agent) induced power decreases around the beta frequency band (15–30 Hz), semantic relatedness variation (low-relatedness vs. high-relatedness) induced power increases in the theta frequency band (4–7 Hz). These results suggested that, in the sentence context, thematic role computing is modulated by the semantic relatedness between the verb and its argument; semantic relatedness processing, however, is in some degree independent from the thematic relations. Moreover, our results indicated that, during on-line sentence comprehension, thematic role computing and semantic relatedness processing are mediated by distinct neural systems. PMID:24755643
A Comparison of Juror Decision Making in Race-Based and Sexual Orientation-Based Hate Crime Cases.
Gamblin, Bradlee W; Kehn, Andre; Vanderzanden, Karen; Ruthig, Joelle C; Jones, Kelly M; Long, Brittney L
2018-05-01
Several constructs have been identified as relevant to the juror decision-making process in hate crime cases. However, there is a lack of research on the relationships between these constructs and their variable influence across victim group. The purpose of the current study was to reexamine factors relevant to the juror decision-making process in hate crime cases within a structural model, and across victim group, to gauge the relative strength and explanatory power of various predictors. In the current study, 313 participants sentenced a perpetrator found guilty of a hate crime committed against either a Black man or a gay man; participants also responded to individual difference measures relevant to mock juror hate crime decision making, including prejudice toward the victim's social group. Using path analysis, we explored the role of juror prejudice on sentencing decisions in hate crime cases as well as similarities and differences based on the victimized group. Results indicated that, when the victim was a Black man, modern racism influenced sentencing both directly and indirectly through perpetrator blame attributions, explaining 18% of the variance in sentencing. In contrast, when the victim was a gay man, modern homophobia did not directly predict sentencing, and the overall model explained only 4% of the variance in sentencing, suggesting variables beyond juror prejudice may be better suited to explain juror decision making in sexual orientation-based hate crimes. The current study suggests that the role of juror prejudice in hate crime cases varies as a function of the victimized group and raises questions about the importance of juror prejudice in the sentencing of hate crime cases, particularly antigay prejudice. The importance of blame attributions, social dominance orientation, and juror beliefs regarding penalty enhancements for hate crime cases, as well as policy implications, are also addressed.
MedSynDiKATe--design considerations for an ontology-based medical text understanding system.
Hahn, U.; Romacker, M.; Schulz, S.
2000-01-01
MedSynDiKATe is a natural language processor for automatically acquiring knowledge from medical finding reports. The content of these documents is transferred to formal representation structures which constitute a corresponding text knowledge base. The general system architecture we present integrates requirements from the analysis of single sentences, as well as those of referentially linked sentences forming cohesive texts. The strong demands MedSynDiKATe poses to the availability of expressive knowledge sources are accounted for by two alternative approaches to (semi)automatic ontology engineering. PMID:11079899
The concomitant effects of phrase length and informational content in sentence comprehension.
Thornton, R; MacDonald, M C; Arnold, J E
2000-03-01
Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects that length manipulations may exert. The results demonstrate that length not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which itself affects modification preferences. Our findings suggest that the same length manipulation affects multiple sources of constraints, both structural and pragmatic, which can each exert differing effects on processing.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Koizumi, Masatoshi; Imamura, Satoshi
2017-01-01
The effects of syntactic and information structures on sentence processing load were investigated using two reading comprehension experiments in Japanese, a head-final SOV language. In the first experiment, we discovered the main effects of syntactic and information structures, as well as their interaction, showing that interaction of these two…
Declarative Intonation in Korean: AN Acoustical Study of F(o) Declination.
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Ko, Do-Heung
This dissertation investigates some acoustic features of declarative intonation in standard Korean based on the hypothesis that fundamental frequency (F_0 ) declination can be syntactically determined. In the course of this study, the following major issues are addressed: (i) What is the relation between sentence length and F_0 contours? (ii) Is there any difference in F_0 patterns between male and female speakers? (iii) Is F_0 declination exclusively a surface structure phenomenon? (iv) Are F_0 contours of parentheticals independent from those of the main clause? (v) What is the effect of word order on variations in F_0 ?. Ten subjects (seven male and three female speakers of the Seoul dialect) read sentences with various types of syntactic structure. In order to analyze F _0 declination phenomena, a software program, DoReMi, and an Impulse Audio Digitizer were used with a Macintosh computer. After obtaining the results from the computer, the Visi-Pitch was also used to confirm some F_0 traces. Major results from this research may be summarized as follows: (i) The rate of declination is not affected by the length of the syntactic unit. Particularly, initial and final values are nearly constant in both progressively longer simplex sentences and expanded embedded sentences. (ii) F_0 contours for male and female subjects are strikingly similar except for the different ranges. (iii) The deletion site plays a certain role in the process of F_0 contours, suggesting that declination may be determined at an underlying or abstract level. (iv) As in English, a parenthetical phrase or clause in Korean has a separate F_0 pattern in its own right, and the parenthetical does not perturb the F_0 pattern of the main clause. (v) Sentences with word orders which are used most frequently in discourse have shown the standard pattern of F_0 declination while orders which are used less frequently have unpredictable F _0 patterns in general.
Parsimonious Compositionality: Probing Syntax and Semantics with French "Propre"
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Charnavel, Isabelle
2012-01-01
This dissertation focuses on the French word "propre" roughly meaning "characteristic-of" and corresponding to English "own" found in "her own thesis." This adjective makes extremely varied and complex contributions to the meaning and properties of sentences it occurs in. The present work addresses the…
Microblogging Activities: Language Play and Tool Transformation
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hattem, David
2014-01-01
The following is a qualitative case study presenting three vignettes exploring the use of language play while microblogging during an academically sanctioned task. Ten students and one teacher used "Twitter" in an intensive, English as a second language advanced grammar course to practice writing sentences with complex grammatical…
Kyong, Jeong S.; Scott, Sophie K.; Rosen, Stuart; Howe, Timothy B.; Agnew, Zarinah K.; McGettigan, Carolyn
2014-01-01
The melodic contour of speech forms an important perceptual aspect of tonal and nontonal languages and an important limiting factor on the intelligibility of speech heard through a cochlear implant. Previous work exploring the neural correlates of speech comprehension identified a left-dominant pathway in the temporal lobes supporting the extraction of an intelligible linguistic message, whereas the right anterior temporal lobe showed an overall preference for signals clearly conveying dynamic pitch information. The current study combined modulations of overall intelligibility (through vocoding and spectral inversion) with a manipulation of pitch contour (normal vs. falling) to investigate the processing of spoken sentences in functional MRI. Our overall findings replicate and extend those of Scott et al., whereas greater sentence intelligibility was predominately associated with increased activity in the left STS, the greatest response to normal sentence melody was found right superior temporal gyrus. These data suggest a spatial distinction between brain areas associated with intelligibility and those involved in the processing of dynamic pitch information in speech. By including a set of complexity-matched unintelligible conditions created by spectral inversion, this is additionally the first study reporting a fully factorial exploration of spectrotemporal complexity and spectral inversion as they relate to the neural processing of speech intelligibility. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no evidence for an interaction between the two factors—we discuss the implications for the processing of sound and speech in the dorsolateral temporal lobes. PMID:24568205
Evolution of scaling behaviors embedded in sentence series from A Story of the Stone
Yang, Yue; Gu, Changgui; Xiao, Qin; Yang, Huijie
2017-01-01
The novel entitled A Story of the Stone provides us precise details of life and social structure of the 18th century China. Its writing lasted a long duration of about 10 years, in which the author’s habit may change significantly. It had been published anonymously up to the beginning of the 20th century, which left a mystery of the author’s attribution. In the present work we focus our attention on scaling behavior embedded in the sentence series from this novel, hope to find how the ideas are organized from single sentences to the whole text. Especially we are interested in the evolution of scale invariance to monitor the changes of the author’s language habit and to find some clues on the author’s attribution. The sentence series are separated into a total of 69 non-overlapping segments with a length of 500 sentences each. The correlation dependent balanced estimation of diffusion entropy (cBEDE) is employed to evaluate the scaling behaviors embedded in the short segments. It is found that the total, the part attributed currently to Xueqin Cao (X-part), and the other part attributed to E Gao (E-part), display scale invariance in a large scale up to 103 sentences, while their scaling exponents are almost identical. All the segments behave scale invariant in considerable wide scales, most of which reach one third of the length. In the curve of scaling exponent versus segment number, the X-part has rich patterns with averagely larger values, while the E-part has a U-shape with a significant low bottom. This finding is a new clue to support the attribution of the E-part to E Gao. PMID:28196096
Evolution of scaling behaviors embedded in sentence series from A Story of the Stone.
Yang, Yue; Gu, Changgui; Xiao, Qin; Yang, Huijie
2017-01-01
The novel entitled A Story of the Stone provides us precise details of life and social structure of the 18th century China. Its writing lasted a long duration of about 10 years, in which the author's habit may change significantly. It had been published anonymously up to the beginning of the 20th century, which left a mystery of the author's attribution. In the present work we focus our attention on scaling behavior embedded in the sentence series from this novel, hope to find how the ideas are organized from single sentences to the whole text. Especially we are interested in the evolution of scale invariance to monitor the changes of the author's language habit and to find some clues on the author's attribution. The sentence series are separated into a total of 69 non-overlapping segments with a length of 500 sentences each. The correlation dependent balanced estimation of diffusion entropy (cBEDE) is employed to evaluate the scaling behaviors embedded in the short segments. It is found that the total, the part attributed currently to Xueqin Cao (X-part), and the other part attributed to E Gao (E-part), display scale invariance in a large scale up to 103 sentences, while their scaling exponents are almost identical. All the segments behave scale invariant in considerable wide scales, most of which reach one third of the length. In the curve of scaling exponent versus segment number, the X-part has rich patterns with averagely larger values, while the E-part has a U-shape with a significant low bottom. This finding is a new clue to support the attribution of the E-part to E Gao.
Segaert, Katrien; Menenti, Laura; Weber, Kirsten; Hagoort, Peter
2011-01-01
Speakers tend to repeat syntactic structures across sentences, a phenomenon called syntactic priming. Although it has been suggested that repeating syntactic structures should result in speeded responses, previous research has focused on effects in response tendencies. We investigated syntactic priming effects simultaneously in response tendencies and response latencies for active and passive transitive sentences in a picture description task. In Experiment 1, there were priming effects in response tendencies for passives and in response latencies for actives. However, when participants' pre-existing preference for actives was altered in Experiment 2, syntactic priming occurred for both actives and passives in response tendencies as well as in response latencies. This is the first investigation of the effects of structure frequency on both response tendencies and latencies in syntactic priming. We discuss the implications of these data for current theories of syntactic processing. PMID:22022352
Flórez, Karen R.; Aguirre, Alejandra N.; Viladrich, Anahí; Céspedes, Amarilis; De La Cruz, Ana Alicia
2008-01-01
Background A growing literature on Latino’s beliefs about cancer focuses on the concept of fatalismo (fatalism), despite numerous conceptual ambiguities concerning its meaning, definition, and measurement. This study explored Latina women’s views on breast cancer and screening within a cultural framework of destino (“destiny”), or the notion that both personal agency and external forces can influence health and life events Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 Latinas from the Dominican Republic aged 40 or over. Results Respondents reported complex notions of health locus of control that encompassed both internal (e.g., individual action) and external (e.g., the will of God) forces shaping breast cancer prevention efforts. Furthermore, women actively participated in screening because they believed that cancer could become a death sentence if diagnosed late or left untreated. Discussion In contrast to simplistic notions of “fatalism”, our analysis suggests complex strategies and beliefs regarding breast cancer and cancer screening that speak of resiliency rather than hopelessness. PMID:18253833
Imagining Counterfactual Worlds in Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Black, Jo; Williams, David; Ferguson, Heather J
2018-02-01
Two experiments are presented that explore online counterfactual processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using eye-tracking. Participants' eye movements were tracked while they read factual and counterfactual sentences in an anomaly detection task. In Experiment 1, the sentences depicted everyday counterfactual situations (e.g., If Joanne had remembered her umbrella, her hair would have been dry/wet when she arrived home). Sentences in Experiment 2 depicted counterfactual versions of real world events (e.g., If the Titanic had not hit an iceberg, it would have survived/sunk along with all the passengers). Results from both experiments suggest that counterfactual understanding is undiminished in adults with ASD. In fact, participants with ASD were faster than Typically Developing (TD) participants to detect anomalies within realistic, discourse-based counterfactuals (Experiment 1). Detection was comparable for TD and ASD groups when understanding could be grounded in knowledge about reality (Experiment 2), though the 2 groups used subtly different strategies for responding to and recovering from counterfactual inconsistent words. These data argue against general difficulties in global coherence and complex integration in ASD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
Some Semantic Structures for Representing English Meanings.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Simmons, R. F.
This paper defines the structure of a semantic network for use in representing discourse and lexical meanings. The structure is designed to represent underlying semantic meanings that, with a lexicon and a grammar, can generate natural-language sentences in a linguistically justifiable manner. The semantics of natural English can be defined as a…
Prototypicality in Sentence Production
Onishi, Kristine H.; Murphy, Gregory L.; Bock, Kathryn
2008-01-01
Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase—a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable. Experiment 1 revealed that an appropriate conceptual framework was necessary to yield the typicality effect. Experiment 2 tested ad-hoc categories that do not have prior representations in long-term memory and yielded no typicality effect. Experiment 3 used carefully matched sentences in which two category members appeared in the same or in different phrases. Typicality affected word order only when the two words appeared in the same phrase. These results are consistent with an account in which typicality has its origin in conceptual structure, which leads to differences in lexical accessibility in appropriate contexts. PMID:17631877
Engelhardt, Paul E; Nigg, Joel T; Ferreira, Fernanda
2013-10-01
There has been little research on the fluency of language production and individual difference variables, such as intelligence and executive function. In this study, we report data from 106 participants who completed a battery of standardized cognitive tasks and a sentence production task. For the sentence production task, participants were presented with two objects and a verb and their task was to formulate a sentence. Four types of disfluency were examined: filled pauses (e.g. uh, um), unfilled pauses, repetitions, and repairs. Repetitions occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then repeats the previous word/phrase, and repairs occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then starts over with a different word/phrase. Hierarchical structural equation modeling revealed a significant relationship between repair disfluencies and inhibition. Conclusions focus on the role of individual differences in cognitive ability and their role in models and theories of language production. © 2013.
Hierarchical Rhetorical Sentence Categorization for Scientific Papers
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Rachman, G. H.; Khodra, M. L.; Widyantoro, D. H.
2018-03-01
Important information in scientific papers can be composed of rhetorical sentences that is structured from certain categories. To get this information, text categorization should be conducted. Actually, some works in this task have been completed by employing word frequency, semantic similarity words, hierarchical classification, and the others. Therefore, this paper aims to present the rhetorical sentence categorization from scientific paper by employing TF-IDF and Word2Vec to capture word frequency and semantic similarity words and employing hierarchical classification. Every experiment is tested in two classifiers, namely Naïve Bayes and SVM Linear. This paper shows that hierarchical classifier is better than flat classifier employing either TF-IDF or Word2Vec, although it increases only almost 2% from 27.82% when using flat classifier until 29.61% when using hierarchical classifier. It shows also different learning model for child-category can be built by hierarchical classifier.
Engelhardt, Paul E.; Nigg, Joel T.; Ferreira, Fernanda
2013-01-01
There has been little research on the fluency of language production and individual differences variables, such as intelligence and executive function. In this study, we report data from 106 participants who completed a battery of standardized cognitive tasks and a sentence production task. For the sentence production task, participants were presented with two objects and a verb and their task was to formulate a sentence. Four types of disfluency were examined: filled pauses (e.g. uh, um), unfilled pauses, repetitions, and repairs. Repetitions occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then repeats the previous word/phrase, and repairs occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then starts over with a different word/phrase. Hierarchical structural equation modeling revealed a significant relationship between repair disfluencies and inhibition. Conclusions focus on the role of individual differences in cognitive ability and their role in models and theories of language production. PMID:24018099
Negative Transfer Effects on L2 Word Order Processing
Erdocia, Kepa; Laka, Itziar
2018-01-01
Does first language (L1) word order affect the processing of non-canonical but grammatical syntactic structures in second language (L2) comprehension? In the present study, we test whether L1-Spanish speakers of L2-Basque process subject–verb–object (SVO) and object–verb–subject (OVS) non-canonical word order sentences of Basque in the same way as Basque native speakers. Crucially, while OVS orders are non-canonical in both Spanish and Basque, SVO is non-canonical in Basque but is the canonical word order in Spanish. Our electrophysiological results showed that the characteristics of L1 affect the processing of the L2 even at highly proficient and early-acquired bilingual populations. Specifically, in the non-native group, we observed a left anterior negativity-like component when comparing S and O at sentence initial position and a P600 when comparing those elements at sentence final position. Those results are similar of those reported by Casado et al. (2005) for native speakers of Spanish indicating that L2-Basque speakers rely in their L1-Spanish when processing SVO–OVS word order sentences. Our results favored the competition model (MacWhinney, 1997). PMID:29593626
Negative Transfer Effects on L2 Word Order Processing.
Erdocia, Kepa; Laka, Itziar
2018-01-01
Does first language (L1) word order affect the processing of non-canonical but grammatical syntactic structures in second language (L2) comprehension? In the present study, we test whether L1-Spanish speakers of L2-Basque process subject-verb-object (SVO) and object-verb-subject (OVS) non-canonical word order sentences of Basque in the same way as Basque native speakers. Crucially, while OVS orders are non-canonical in both Spanish and Basque, SVO is non-canonical in Basque but is the canonical word order in Spanish. Our electrophysiological results showed that the characteristics of L1 affect the processing of the L2 even at highly proficient and early-acquired bilingual populations. Specifically, in the non-native group, we observed a left anterior negativity-like component when comparing S and O at sentence initial position and a P600 when comparing those elements at sentence final position. Those results are similar of those reported by Casado et al. (2005) for native speakers of Spanish indicating that L2-Basque speakers rely in their L1-Spanish when processing SVO-OVS word order sentences. Our results favored the competition model (MacWhinney, 1997).
Sentence processing in the cerebral cortex.
Sakai, K L; Hashimoto, R; Homae, F
2001-01-01
Human language is a unique faculty of the mind. It has been the ultimate mystery throughout the history of neuroscience. Despite many aphasia and functional imaging studies, the exact correlation between cortical language areas and subcomponents of the linguistic system has not been established. One notable drawback is that most functional imaging studies have tested language tasks at the word level, such as lexical decision and word generation tasks, thereby neglecting the syntactic aspects of the language faculty. As proposed by Chomsky, the critical knowledge of language involves universal grammar (UG), which governs the syntactic structure of sentences. In this article, we will review recent advances made by functional neuroimaging studies of language, focusing especially on sentence processing in the cerebral cortex. We also present the recent results of our functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study intended to identify cortical areas specifically involved in syntactic processing. A study of sentence processing that employs a newly developed technique, optical topography (OT), is also presented. Based on these findings, we propose a modular specialization of Broca's area, Wernicke's area, and the angular gyrus/supramarginal gyrus. The current direction of research in neuroscience is beginning to establish the existence of distinct modules responsible for our knowledge of language.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
ROSS, JOHN ROBERT
THIS ANALYSIS OF UNDERLYING SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE IS BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE PARTS OF SPEECH CALLED "VERBS" AND "ADJECTIVES" ARE TWO SUBCATEGORIES OF ONE MAJOR LEXICAL CATEGORY, "PREDICATE." FROM THIS ASSUMPTION, THE HYPOTHESIS IS ADVANCED THAT, IN LANGUAGES EXHIBITING THE COPULA, THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES CONTAINING PREDICATE…
Development of dialog system powered by textual educational content
NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)
Bisikalo, Oleg V.; Dovgalets, Sergei M.; Pijarski, Paweł; Lisovenko, Anna I.
2016-09-01
The advances in computer technology require an interconnection between a man and computer, more specifically, between complex information systems. The paper is therefore dedicated to creation of dialog systems, able to respond to users depending on the implemented textual educational content. To support the dialog there had been suggested the knowledge base model on the basis of the unit and a fuzzy sense relation. Lexical meanings is taken out from the text by processing the syntactic links between the allologs of all the sentences and the answer shall be generated as the composition of a fuzzy ratios upon the formal criterion. The information support technology had been put to an evaluation sample test, which demonstrates the combination of information from some sentences in the final response.
Investigating the Validity of Two Widely Used Quantitative Text Tools
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Cunningham, James W.; Hiebert, Elfrieda H.; Mesmer, Heidi Anne
2018-01-01
In recent years, readability formulas have gained new prominence as a basis for selecting texts for learning and assessment. Variables that quantitative tools count (e.g., word frequency, sentence length) provide valid measures of text complexity insofar as they accurately predict representative and high-quality criteria. The longstanding…
The Picture Complexity Effect: Another List Composition Paradox
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Nguyen, Khuyen; McDaniel, Mark A.
2015-01-01
"List composition effects" refer to the findings in which a given memory phenomenon shows discrepant patterns across different list designs (i.e., mixed or pure lists). These effects have typically been reported with verbal materials (e.g., word lists, paired associates, sentences); much less research has examined whether these effects…
A Scheme for Text Analysis Using Fortran.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Koether, Mary E.; Coke, Esther U.
Using string-manipulation algorithms, FORTRAN computer programs were designed for analysis of written material. The programs measure length of a text and its complexity in terms of the average length of words and sentences, map the occurrences of keywords or phrases, calculate word frequency distribution and certain indicators of style. Trials of…
Ultimate Attainment of Anaphora Resolution in L2 Chinese
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Zhao, Lucy Xia
2014-01-01
The current study tests the Interface Hypothesis through forward and backward anaphora in complex sentences with temporal subordinate clauses in highly proficient English-speaking learners' second-language (L2) Chinese. Forward anaphora is involved when the overt pronoun "ta" "he/she" or a null element appears in the subject…
Phonics Pathways. 7th Edition.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hiskes, Dolores G.
This book uses phonics to teach reading in a complete manual for beginning and remedial readers of all ages. The book builds sounds and spelling patterns slowly and systematically into syllables, phrases, and sentences of gradually increasing complexity, presenting only one sound per lesson--each new sound builds upon previously learned skills for…
Effect of Blast Injury on Auditory Localization in Military Service Members.
Kubli, Lina R; Brungart, Douglas; Northern, Jerry
Among the many advantages of binaural hearing are the abilities to localize sounds in space and to attend to one sound in the presence of many sounds. Binaural hearing provides benefits for all listeners, but it may be especially critical for military personnel who must maintain situational awareness in complex tactical environments with multiple speech and noise sources. There is concern that Military Service Members who have been exposed to one or more high-intensity blasts during their tour of duty may have difficulty with binaural and spatial ability due to degradation in auditory and cognitive processes. The primary objective of this study was to assess the ability of blast-exposed Military Service Members to localize speech sounds in quiet and in multisource environments with one or two competing talkers. Participants were presented with one, two, or three topic-related (e.g., sports, food, travel) sentences under headphones and required to attend to, and then locate the source of, the sentence pertaining to a prespecified target topic within a virtual space. The listener's head position was monitored by a head-mounted tracking device that continuously updated the apparent spatial location of the target and competing speech sounds as the subject turned within the virtual space. Measurements of auditory localization ability included mean absolute error in locating the source of the target sentence, the time it took to locate the target sentence within 30 degrees, target/competitor confusion errors, response time, and cumulative head motion. Twenty-one blast-exposed Active-Duty or Veteran Military Service Members (blast-exposed group) and 33 non-blast-exposed Service Members and beneficiaries (control group) were evaluated. In general, the blast-exposed group performed as well as the control group if the task involved localizing the source of a single speech target. However, if the task involved two or three simultaneous talkers, localization ability was compromised for some participants in the blast-exposed group. Blast-exposed participants were less accurate in their localization responses and required more exploratory head movements to find the location of the target talker. Results suggest that blast-exposed participants have more difficulty than non-blast-exposed participants in localizing sounds in complex acoustic environments. This apparent deficit in spatial hearing ability highlights the need to develop new diagnostic tests using complex listening tasks that involve multiple sound sources that require speech segregation and comprehension.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Yamashita, Taichi; Iizuka, Takehiro
2017-01-01
Discussion of the roles of input and output has been attracting a number of researchers in second language acquisition (e.g., DeKeyser, 2007; Doughty, 1991; Krashen, 1982; Long, 1983; Norris & Ortega, 2000; Swain, 2000), and VanPatten (2004) advocated that both structured input and structured output allow learners to process input properly.…
On the Parity of Structural Persistence in Language Production and Comprehension
Tooley, Kristen M.; Bock, Kathryn
2014-01-01
Structural priming creates structural persistence. That is, differences in experience with syntax can change subsequent language performance, and the changes can be observed in both language production and comprehension. However, the effects in comprehension and production appear to differ. In comprehension, persistence is typically found when the verbs are the same in primes and targets; in production, persistence occurs without verb overlap. The contrast suggests a theoretically important hypothesis: parsing in comprehension is lexically driven while formulation in production is structurally driven. A major weakness in this hypothesis about comprehension-production differences is that its empirical motivation rests on the outcomes of experiments in which the priming manipulations differ, the primed sentence structures differ, and the measures of priming differ. To sharpen the comparison, we examined structural persistence with and without verb overlap in both reading comprehension and spoken production, using the same prime presentation procedure, the same syntactic structures, the same sentences, and the same participants. These methods yielded abstract sructural persistence in comprehension as well as production. A measure of the strength of persistence revealed significant effects of priming and verb overlap without significant comprehension—production differences. This argues for uniformity in the structural mechanisms of language processing. PMID:24803423
Extrinsic Cognitive Load Impairs Spoken Word Recognition in High- and Low-Predictability Sentences.
Hunter, Cynthia R; Pisoni, David B
Listening effort (LE) induced by speech degradation reduces performance on concurrent cognitive tasks. However, a converse effect of extrinsic cognitive load on recognition of spoken words in sentences has not been shown. The aims of the present study were to (a) examine the impact of extrinsic cognitive load on spoken word recognition in a sentence recognition task and (b) determine whether cognitive load and/or LE needed to understand spectrally degraded speech would differentially affect word recognition in high- and low-predictability sentences. Downstream effects of speech degradation and sentence predictability on the cognitive load task were also examined. One hundred twenty young adults identified sentence-final spoken words in high- and low-predictability Speech Perception in Noise sentences. Cognitive load consisted of a preload of short (low-load) or long (high-load) sequences of digits, presented visually before each spoken sentence and reported either before or after identification of the sentence-final word. LE was varied by spectrally degrading sentences with four-, six-, or eight-channel noise vocoding. Level of spectral degradation and order of report (digits first or words first) were between-participants variables. Effects of cognitive load, sentence predictability, and speech degradation on accuracy of sentence-final word identification as well as recall of preload digit sequences were examined. In addition to anticipated main effects of sentence predictability and spectral degradation on word recognition, we found an effect of cognitive load, such that words were identified more accurately under low load than high load. However, load differentially affected word identification in high- and low-predictability sentences depending on the level of sentence degradation. Under severe spectral degradation (four-channel vocoding), the effect of cognitive load on word identification was present for high-predictability sentences but not for low-predictability sentences. Under mild spectral degradation (eight-channel vocoding), the effect of load was present for low-predictability sentences but not for high-predictability sentences. There were also reliable downstream effects of speech degradation and sentence predictability on recall of the preload digit sequences. Long digit sequences were more easily recalled following spoken sentences that were less spectrally degraded. When digits were reported after identification of sentence-final words, short digit sequences were recalled more accurately when the spoken sentences were predictable. Extrinsic cognitive load can impair recognition of spectrally degraded spoken words in a sentence recognition task. Cognitive load affected word identification in both high- and low-predictability sentences, suggesting that load may impact both context use and lower-level perceptual processes. Consistent with prior work, LE also had downstream effects on memory for visual digit sequences. Results support the proposal that extrinsic cognitive load and LE induced by signal degradation both draw on a central, limited pool of cognitive resources that is used to recognize spoken words in sentences under adverse listening conditions.
Sentence Combining: Everything for Everybody or Something for Somebody.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Ney, James W.
Sentence combining exercises present material to the students to be mastered by processes similar to memorization. By taking ideas in short sentences and compacting them into larger sentences, students become familiar with the relationships between the ideas in the short sentences. At its best, sentence combining is a process that requires the…
Parallel Mechanisms of Sentence Processing: Assigning Roles to Constituents of Sentences.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
McClelland, James L.; Kawamoto, Alan H.
This paper describes and illustrates a simulation model for the processing of grammatical elements in a sentence, focusing on one aspect of sentence comprehension: the assignment of the constituent elements of a sentence to the correct thematic case roles. The model addresses questions about sentence processing from a perspective very different…
Memory for the Pragmatic Implications of Sentences. Technical Report No. 65.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Brewer, William F.
A sentence "pragmatically implies" another sentence when information in the first sentence leads the hearer to expect something that is neither explicitly stated nor necessarily implied by the original sentence. Thus, the sentence "The safe-cracker put the match to the fuse" pragmatically implies that "the safe-cracker lit…
Gattei, Carolina A; Dickey, Michael W; Wainselboim, Alejandro J; París, Luis
2015-01-01
Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand "who did what to whom" in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object-experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax-semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence comprehension with alternative word orders. Results indicate that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when the order of the constituents in the sentence mirrors their ranking on a semantic hierarchy that encodes a verb's lexical semantics. Moreover, results show that during online comprehension, predictive mechanisms based on argument hierarchization are used rapidly to inform the processing system. Our findings corroborate already existing cross-linguistic evidence on the issue and are briefly discussed in the light of other sentence-processing models.
Rajan, R; Cainer, K E
2008-06-23
In most everyday settings, speech is heard in the presence of competing sounds and understanding speech requires skills in auditory streaming and segregation, followed by identification and recognition, of the attended signals. Ageing leads to difficulties in understanding speech in noisy backgrounds. In addition to age-related changes in hearing-related factors, cognitive factors also play a role but it is unclear to what extent these are generalized or modality-specific cognitive factors. We examined how ageing in normal-hearing decade age cohorts from 20 to 69 years affected discrimination of open-set speech in background noise. We used two types of sentences of similar structural and linguistic characteristics but different masking levels (i.e. differences in signal-to-noise ratios required for detection of sentences in a standard masker) so as to vary sentence demand, and two background maskers (one causing purely energetic masking effects and the other causing energetic and informational masking) to vary load conditions. There was a decline in performance (measured as speech reception thresholds for perception of sentences in noise) in the oldest cohort for both types of sentences, but only in the presence of the more demanding informational masker. We interpret these results to indicate a modality-specific decline in cognitive processing, likely a decrease in the ability to use acoustic and phonetic cues efficiently to segregate speech from background noise, in subjects aged >60.
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Gabbard, Ryan
2010-01-01
Understanding the syntactic structure of a sentence is a necessary preliminary to understanding its semantics and therefore for many practical applications. The field of natural language processing has achieved a high degree of accuracy in parsing, at least in English. However, the syntactic structures produced by the most commonly used parsers…
Time Course of Grammatical Encoding in Agrammatism
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Lee, Jiyeon
2011-01-01
Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…
[Does action semantic knowledge influence mental simulation in sentence comprehension?].
Mochizuki, Masaya; Naito, Katsuo
2012-04-01
This research investigated whether action semantic knowledge influences mental simulation during sentence comprehension. In Experiment 1, we confirmed that the words of face-related objects include the perceptual knowledge about the actions that bring the object to the face. In Experiment 2, we used an acceptability judgment task and a word-picture verification task to compare the perceptual information that is activated by the comprehension of sentences describing an action using face-related objects near the face (near-sentence) or far from the face (far-sentence). Results showed that participants took a longer time to judge the acceptability of the far-sentence than the near-sentence. Verification times were significantly faster when the actions in the pictures matched the action described in the sentences than when they were mismatched. These findings suggest that action semantic knowledge influences sentence processing, and that perceptual information corresponding to the content of the sentence is activated regardless of the action semantic knowledge at the end of the sentence processing.
The Acquisition of Verb Argument Structure in Basilectal Jakarta Indonesian
ERIC Educational Resources Information Center
Hidajat, Lanny
2010-01-01
This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the…
Representation Learning of Logic Words by an RNN: From Word Sequences to Robot Actions
Yamada, Tatsuro; Murata, Shingo; Arie, Hiroaki; Ogata, Tetsuya
2017-01-01
An important characteristic of human language is compositionality. We can efficiently express a wide variety of real-world situations, events, and behaviors by compositionally constructing the meaning of a complex expression from a finite number of elements. Previous studies have analyzed how machine-learning models, particularly neural networks, can learn from experience to represent compositional relationships between language and robot actions with the aim of understanding the symbol grounding structure and achieving intelligent communicative agents. Such studies have mainly dealt with the words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) that directly refer to real-world matters. In addition to these words, the current study deals with logic words, such as “not,” “and,” and “or” simultaneously. These words are not directly referring to the real world, but are logical operators that contribute to the construction of meaning in sentences. In human–robot communication, these words may be used often. The current study builds a recurrent neural network model with long short-term memory units and trains it to learn to translate sentences including logic words into robot actions. We investigate what kind of compositional representations, which mediate sentences and robot actions, emerge as the network's internal states via the learning process. Analysis after learning shows that referential words are merged with visual information and the robot's own current state, and the logical words are represented by the model in accordance with their functions as logical operators. Words such as “true,” “false,” and “not” work as non-linear transformations to encode orthogonal phrases into the same area in a memory cell state space. The word “and,” which required a robot to lift up both its hands, worked as if it was a universal quantifier. The word “or,” which required action generation that looked apparently random, was represented as an unstable space of the network's dynamical system. PMID:29311891
Representation Learning of Logic Words by an RNN: From Word Sequences to Robot Actions.
Yamada, Tatsuro; Murata, Shingo; Arie, Hiroaki; Ogata, Tetsuya
2017-01-01
An important characteristic of human language is compositionality. We can efficiently express a wide variety of real-world situations, events, and behaviors by compositionally constructing the meaning of a complex expression from a finite number of elements. Previous studies have analyzed how machine-learning models, particularly neural networks, can learn from experience to represent compositional relationships between language and robot actions with the aim of understanding the symbol grounding structure and achieving intelligent communicative agents. Such studies have mainly dealt with the words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs) that directly refer to real-world matters. In addition to these words, the current study deals with logic words, such as "not," "and," and "or" simultaneously. These words are not directly referring to the real world, but are logical operators that contribute to the construction of meaning in sentences. In human-robot communication, these words may be used often. The current study builds a recurrent neural network model with long short-term memory units and trains it to learn to translate sentences including logic words into robot actions. We investigate what kind of compositional representations, which mediate sentences and robot actions, emerge as the network's internal states via the learning process. Analysis after learning shows that referential words are merged with visual information and the robot's own current state, and the logical words are represented by the model in accordance with their functions as logical operators. Words such as "true," "false," and "not" work as non-linear transformations to encode orthogonal phrases into the same area in a memory cell state space. The word "and," which required a robot to lift up both its hands, worked as if it was a universal quantifier. The word "or," which required action generation that looked apparently random, was represented as an unstable space of the network's dynamical system.
Penke, Martina; Wimmer, Eva
2018-01-01
The aim of the study is to investigate if German children with hearing loss (HL) display persisting problems in comprehending complex sentences and to find out whether these problems can be linked to limitations in phonological short-term memory (PSTM). A who-question comprehension test (picture pointing) and a nonword repetition (NWR) task were conducted with 21 German children with bilateral sensorineural HL (ages 3-4) and with age-matched 19 normal hearing (NH) children. Follow-up data (ages 6-8) are reported for 10 of the children with HL. The data reveal that the comprehension of who-questions as well as PSTM was significantly more impaired in children with HL than in children with NH. For both groups of participants, there were no correlations between question comprehension scores and performance in the NWR test. Syntactic complexity (subject vs. object question) affected question comprehension in children with HL, however, these problems were overcome at school age. In conclusion, the data indicate that a hearing loss affects the comprehension of complex sentences. The observed problems did, however, not persist and were, therefore, unlikely to be caused by a genuine syntactic deficit. For the tested wh-questions, there is no indication that syntactic comprehension problems of children with HL are due to limitations in PSTM.
Eberhardt, Melanie; Nadig, Aparna
2018-01-01
We present two experiments examining the universality and uniqueness of reduced context sensitivity in language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), as proposed by the Weak Central Coherence account (Happé & Frith, 2006, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(1), 25). That is, do all children with ASD exhibit decreased context sensitivity, and is this characteristic specific to ASD versus other neurodevelopmental conditions? Experiment 1, conducted in English, was a comparison of children with ASD with normal language and their typically-developing peers on a picture selection task where interpretation of sentential context was required to identify homonyms. Contrary to the predictions of Weak Central Coherence, the ASD-normal language group exhibited no difficulty on this task. Experiment 2, conducted in German, compared children with ASD with variable language abilities, typically-developing children, and a second control group of children with Language Impairment (LI) on a sentence completion task where a context sentence had to be considered to produce the continuation of an ambiguous sentence fragment. Both ASD-variable language and LI groups exhibited reduced context sensitivity and did not differ from each other. Finally, to directly test which factors contribute to reduced context sensitivity, we conducted a regression analysis for each experiment, entering nonverbal IQ, structural language ability, and autism diagnosis as predictors. For both experiments structural language ability emerged as the only significant predictor. These convergent findings demonstrate that reduced sensitivity to context in language processing is linked to low structural language rather than ASD diagnosis. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.