One of the liveliest forums for sharing psychological, linguistic, philosophical, and computer science perspectives on psycholinguistics has been the annual meeting of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. Documenting the state of the art in several important approaches to sentence processing, this volume consists of selected papers that had been presented at the Sixth CUNY Conference. The editors not only present the main themes that ran through the conference but also honor the breadth of the presentations from disciplines including linguistics, experimental psychology, and computer science. The variety of sentence processing topics examined includes: * how evoked brain potentials reflect sentence comprehension * how auditory words are processed * how various sources of grammatical and nongrammatical information are coordinated and used * how sentence processing and language acquisition might be related. This distinctive volume not only presents the most exciting current work in sentence processing, but also places this research into the broader context of theorizing about it.

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.

Bilingual Sentence Processing

This addition to the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition series presents a comprehensive review of the latest research findings on sentence processing in second language acquisition. The book begins with a broad overview of the core issues of second language sentence processing research and then narrows its focus by dedicating individual chapters to each of these key areas. While a number of publications have discussed research findings on knowledge of formal syntactic principles as part of theories of second language acquisition, there are fewer resources dedicated to the role of second language sentence processing in this context. This volume will act as the first full-length literature review of the field on the market.

Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.

Sentence comprehension - the way we process and understand spoken and written language - is a central and important area of research within psycholinguistics. This book explores the contribution of computational linguistics to the field, showing how computational models of sentence processing can help scientists in their investigation of human cognitive processes. It presents the leading computational model of retrieval processes in sentence processing, the Lewis and Vasishth cue-based retrieval mode, and develops a principled methodology for parameter estimation and model comparison/evaluation using benchmark data, to enable researchers to test their own models of retrieval against the present model. It also provides readers with an overview of the last 20 years of research on the topic of retrieval processes in sentence comprehension, along with source code that allows researchers to extend the model and carry out new research. Comprehensive in its scope, this book is essential reading for researchers in cognitive science.

The topic addressed in this volume lies within the study of sentence processing, which is one of the major divisions of psycholinguistics. The goal has been to understand the structure and functioning of the mental mechanisms involved in sentence comprehension. Most of the experimental and theoretical work during the last twenty or thirty years has focused on 'first-pass parsing', the process of assigning structure to a sentence as its words are encountered, one at a time, 'from left to right' . One important guiding idea has been to delineate the processing mechanisms by studying where they fai!. For this purpose we identify types of sentences which perceivers have trouble assigning structure to. An important class of perceptually difficult senten ces are those which contain temporary ambiguities. Since the parsing mechanism cannot tell what the intended structure is, it may make an incorrect guess. Then later on in the sentence, the structure assignment process breaks down, because the later words do not fit with the incorrect structural analysis. This is called a 'garden path' situation. When it occurs, the parsing mechanism must somehow correct itself, and find a different analysis which is compatible with the incoming words. This reanalysis process is the subject of the research reported here.

Using sentence comprehension as a case study for all of cognitive science, David Townsend and Thomas Bever offer an integration of two major approaches, the symbolic-computational and the associative-connectionist. The symbolic-computational approach emphasizes the formal manipulation of symbols that underlies creative aspects of language behavior. The associative-connectionist approach captures the intuition that most behaviors consist of accumulated habits. The authors argue that the sentence is the natural level at which associative and symbolic information merge during comprehension. The authors develop and support an analysis-by-synthesis model that integrates associative and symbolic information in sentence comprehension. This integration resolves problems each approach faces when considered independently. The authors review classic and contemporary symbolic and associative theories of sentence comprehension, and show how recent developments in syntactic theory fit well with the integrated analysis-by-synthesis model. They offer analytic, experimental, and neurological evidence for their model and discuss its implications for broader issues in cognitive science, including the logical necessity of an integration of symbolic and connectionist approaches in the field.