What does parsing mean?
-how to organize a sentence
What are the four types of temporarily ambiguous sentences?
- object/clause
- early/late closure
- main clause/reduced relative
- low/high PP
The students evaluated their professor at the end of term.
The students evaluated by the TA scored higher.
Example of what type of temporarily ambiguous sentence?
main clause/reduced relative
Paula knew the guy from high school.
Paula knew the guy was a creep.
object/clause
When Sam answered the vendor was surprised.
When Sam answered the door the vendor was surprised.
early/late closure
Explain the Garden-Path model
- serial, modular (initial decisions made on syntactic principles)
- minimal attachment: if you have a temporary ambiguity, you’re going to go with the option with the least number of nodes
- late closure: if you’re parsing a phrase or a clause and you’ve got to make a decision about whether to end that state or clause or to start a new one or to keep it open for as long as possible
-reanalysis-consider other sources of information when you reread the sentence
Explain the constraint-based lexicalist theory.
What sources of information would contribute to parsing decisions?
- parallel, interactive
- contraint on how likely a given parse is to be selected
-prosody, co-occurrence & subcategorization frequencies, prior context, real-world knowledge & plausibility
What is a relative clause?
-a relative clause that is not marked by an overt relative pronoun or complementizer (such as who, which or that
Name the methods of observing sentence processing
Off-line: made after you have processed all the information
- grammaticality judgments
- comprehension questions
On-line: processing throughout
- eye-tracking
- self-paced reading
- event-related potentials
ELAN refers to ?
syntax
N400 refers to ?
semantics
P600 refers to ?
a combination of syntax and semantics
Does verb bias help prevent a garden-path?
Yes
