Perspectives On Sentence Processing

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.

Recent studies in psycho linguistics have ranged through a variety of languages. In this trend, which has no precedent, studies in language processing have followed studies in language acquisition and theoretical linguistics in considering language universals in a broader scope than only in English. Since the beginning of the century, studies in language acquisition have produced a vast body of data from a number of Indoeuropean languages, and the emphasis on the universal has preceded the emphasis on the particular (see (Slobin 1985) for a review). Nowadays, the research in the field advances by means of a continuous linking between the cross-linguistic uniformities and the individual language influences on development. The level of language universals is continuously refined as the data from a number of languages contribute to the elaboration of a more distinctive picture of the language of children. The first cross-linguistic studies in theoretical linguistics appeared at the end of the seventies. Within the Chomskian paradigm, the reference to the Romance languages caused a shift from a rule-based toward a principle-based formalism (Chomsky 1981, 1995); within alternative theories, the reduced prominence of the pure phrase structure component in favor of the lexicon and/or the functional relations (see, e.g., Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan 1982), Relational Grammar (Perlmutter 1983)) sought empirical support in languages exhibiting deep structural differences with respect to English (e.g. Bantu, Malayalam, Romance and Slavic languages Warlpiri). The M. De Vincenzi and V. Lombardo (eds.), Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Language Processing, 1-19.

What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with language impairments process sentences in the same way as healthy monolingual adults? These are just some of the many questions that sentence processing researchers have tried to answer by conducting ever more sophisticated experiments, making this one of the most productive and exciting areas in experimental language research in recent years. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this important field. It contains 10 chapters written by world-leading experts, which discuss influential theories of sentence processing and important experimental evidence, with a focus on recent developments in the area. The chapters also analyse research that has investigated how people process the structure and meaning of sentences, and how sentences are understood within their context. This comprehensive and authoritative work will appeal to students and researchers in the field of sentence processing, as well anyone with an interest in psychology and linguistics.

This volume highlights current theories of the lexicon from the perspective of its use in sentence understanding. It includes work from researchers in psycholinguistic studies on sentence comprehension.

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.

The best survey of the subject available, The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language brings together the world's foremost researchers to provide a one-stop resource for the study of language acquisition and development. Grouped into five thematic sections, the handbook is organized by topic, making it easier for students and researchers to use when looking up specific in-depth information. It covers a wider range of subjects than any other handbook on the market, with chapters covering both theories and methods in child language research and tracing the development of language from prelinguistic infancy to teenager. Drawing on both established and more recent research, the Handbook surveys the crosslinguistic study of language acquisition; prelinguistic development; bilingualism; sign languages; specific language impairment, language and autism, Down syndrome and Williams syndrome. This book will be an essential reference for students and researchers working in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, speech pathology, education and anthropology.