This book reviews interdisciplinary work on the mental processing of syntax and morphology. It focuses on the fundamental questions at the centre of this research, for example whether language processing proceeds in a serial or a parallel manner; which areas of the brain support the processing of syntactic and morphological information; whether there are neurophysiological correlates of language processing; and the degree to which neurolinguistic findings on syntactic and morphological processing are consistent with theoretical conceptions of syntax and morphology. The authors describe the outcomes of methods in neurophysiology (for example, functional magnetic resonance imaging), behavioural psycholinguistics, and neuropsychological lesion studies, and provide brief introductions to the methods themselves. They extend basic findings at the word and sentence level by considering how the mental processing of syntax and morphology relates to prosody, discourse, semantics, and world knowledge. They have divided the work into four parts concerned with word structure, sentence structure, processing syntax and morphology at the interfaces, and a comparison of different models of syntactic and morphological processing in the neurophysiological domain. The book is directed at graduate students and researchers in theoretical linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, neurophysiology, and psychology.

Many NLP tasks have at their core a subtask of extracting the dependencies—who did what to whom—from natural language sentences. This task can be understood as the inverse of the problem solved in different ways by diverse human languages, namely, how to indicate the relationship between different parts of a sentence. Understanding how languages solve the problem can be extremely useful in both feature design and error analysis in the application of machine learning to NLP. Likewise, understanding cross-linguistic variation can be important for the design of MT systems and other multilingual applications. The purpose of this book is to present in a succinct and accessible fashion information about the morphological and syntactic structure of human languages that can be useful in creating more linguistically sophisticated, more language-independent, and thus more successful NLP systems. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction/motivation / Morphology: Introduction / Morphophonology / Morphosyntax / Syntax: Introduction / Parts of speech / Heads, arguments, and adjuncts / Argument types and grammatical functions / Mismatches between syntactic position and semantic roles / Resources / Bibliography / Author's Biography / General Index / Index of Languages

This book puts together contributions of linguists and psycholinguists whose main interest here is the representation of Semitic words in the mental lexicon of Semitic language speakers. The central topic of the book confronts two views about the morphology of Semitic words. The point of the argument is: Should we see Semitic words’ morphology as “root-based” or “word-based?” The proponents of the root-based approach, present empirical evidence demonstrating that Semitic language speakers are sensitive to the root and the template as the two basic elements (bound morphemes) of Semitic words. Those supporting the word-based approach, present arguments to the effect that Semitic word formation is not based on the merging of roots and templates, but that Semitic words are comprised of word stems and affixes like we find in Indo-European languages. The variety of evidence and arguments for each claim should force the interested readers to reconsider their views on Semitic morphology.

Synthesizing a range of studies on morphological processing from the past 30 years, this edited collection presents the current state of knowledge on morphological processing and defines classroom practices to help students conceptualise the role of morphology in reading, spelling, and vocabulary development. Research has increasingly indicated the importance of morphological tasks in relation to reading, spelling, and vocabulary acquisition in the classroom. Chapter authors present the theoretical considerations guiding morphological processing research to date, address the use of morphology with reference to different populations of learners, and propose effective and innovative instructional strategies for integrating morphology in the classroom.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a scientific discipline which is found at the interface of computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Providing an overview of international work in this interdisciplinary field, this book gives the reader a panoramic view of both early and current research in NLP. Carefully chosen multilingual examples present the state of the art of a mature field which is in a constant state of evolution. In four chapters, this book presents the fundamental concepts of phonetics and phonology and the two most important applications in the field of speech processing: recognition and synthesis. Also presented are the fundamental concepts of corpus linguistics and the basic concepts of morphology and its NLP applications such as stemming and part of speech tagging. The fundamental notions and the most important syntactic theories are presented, as well as the different approaches to syntactic parsing with reference to cognitive models, algorithms and computer applications.

The book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of morphology, syntax, computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). It provides a critical and practical guide to computational techniques for handling morphological and syntactic phenomena, showing how these techniques have been used and modified in practice. The authors discuss the nature and uses of syntactic parsers and examine the problems and opportunities of parsing algorithms for finite-state, context-free and various context-sensitive grammars. They relate approaches for describing syntax and morphology to formal mechanisms and algorithms, and present well-motivated approaches for augmenting grammars with weights or probabilities.

This book reviews interdisciplinary work on the mental processing of syntax and morphology. It focuses on the fundamental questions at the centre of this research, for example whether language processing proceeds in a serial or a parallel manner; which areas of the brain support the processing of syntactic and morphological information; whether there are neurophysiological correlates of language processing; and the degree to which neurolinguistic findings on syntactic andmorphological processing are consistent with theoretical conceptions of syntax and morphology. The authors describe the outcomes of methods in neurophysiology (for example, functional magnetic resonance imaging), behavioural psycholinguistics, and neuropsychological lesion studies, and provide briefintroductions to the methods themselves. They extend basic findings at the word and sentence level by considering how the mental processing of syntax and morphology relates to prosody, discourse, semantics, and world knowledge. They have divided the work into four parts concerned with word structure, sentence structure, processing syntax and morphology at the interfaces, and a comparison of different models of syntactic and morphological processing in the neurophysiological domain. The book isdirected at graduate students and researchers in theoretical linguistics, psycho- and neurolinguistics, neurophysiology, and psychology.

The innovative element of this volume is its overview of the fundamental psycholinguistic topics involved in sentence processing. While most psycholinguistic studies focus on a single language and induce a general model of universal sentence processing, this volume proposes a cross-linguistic approach. It contains two distinct features first embraced in the 18th century by brothers Freiherr Wilhelm von Humboldt and Alexander von Humboldt. First, it offers a linguistic theory that characterizes universal cognitive features of the human language processor (or the mind and its biological source), independent of a single language structure. Second, it contains a language theory which considers the diversity of linguistic structures and provides a powerful theory of language processing. Contributors cover a wide range of topics, including word recognition, fixed expressions, grammatical constraints, empty categories, and parsing. Their research involves analyses of 12 languages. This book provides an overview of central psycholinguistic topics in sentence processing; and combines deductive and inductive methods in fashioning an innovative approach. The contributors address word recognition, fixed expressions, grammatical constraints, empty categories, and parsing. Its original papers form a coherent presentation.

It is now well established that phonological -- and orthographic -- codes play a crucial role in the recognition of isolated words and in understanding the sequences of words that comprise a sentence. However, words and sentences are organized with respect to morphological as well as phonological components. It is thus unfortunate that the morpheme has received relatively little attention in the experimental literature, either from psychologists or linguists. Due to recent methodological developments, however, now is an opportune time to address morphological issues. In the experimental literature, there is a tendency to examine various psycholinguistic processes in English and then to assume that the account given applies with equal significance to English and to other languages. Written languages differ, however, in the extent to which they capture phonological as contrasted with morphological units. Moreover, with respect to the morpheme, languages differ in the principle by which morphemes are connected to form new words. This volume focuses on morphological processes in word recognition and reading with an eye toward comparing morphological processes with orthographic and phonological processes. Cross-language comparisons are examined as a tool with which to probe universal linguistic processes, and a variety of research methodologies are described. Because it makes the experimental literature in languages other than English more accessible, this book is expected to be of interest to many readers. It also directs attention to the subject of language processing in general -- an issue which is of central interest to cognitive psychologists and linguists as well as educators and clinicians.

This book provides the first broad yet thorough coverage of issues in morphological theory. It includes a wide array of techniques and systems in computational morphology (including discussion of their limitations), and describes some unusual applications.Sproat motivates the study of computational morphology by arguing that a computational natural language system, such as a parser or a generator, must incorporate a model of morphology. He discusses a range of applications for programs with knowledge of morphology, some of which are not generally found in the literature. Sproat then provides an overview of some of the basic descriptive facts about morphology and issues in theoretical morphology and (lexical) phonology, as well as psycholinguistic evidence for human processing of morphological structure. He take up the basic techniques that have been proposed for doing morphological processing and discusses at length various systems (such as DECOMP and KIMMO) that incorporate part or all of those techniques, pointing out the inadequacies of such systems from both a descriptive and a computational point of view. He concludes by touching on interesting peripheral areas such as the analysis of complex nominals in English, and on the main contributions of Rumelhart and McClelland's connectionism to the computational analysis of words.