A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation

Jurafsky, Daniel

doi:10.1207/s15516709cog2002_1

Cited by 436 publications

(270 citation statements)

References 98 publications

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“…These biases most likely arise over long-term experience using those verbs in those particular constructions. The problem becomes deeper if one presumes that language comprehension and language production make use of the same representations, as several studies have reported lexical effects on syntactic processing (e.g., Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993), and several theories of sentence comprehension give an important role to lexical information (e.g., MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994;Jurafsky, 1996). By all accounts, the relevant probabilistic information about the use of particular lexical items in particular constructions must have accrued over long spans of linguistic experience.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is long-term structural priming affected by patterns of experience with individual verbs?☆

Kaschak

Borreggine

2008

Journal of Memory and Language

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Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these long-term priming effects are modulated by the participants' patterns of experience with particular verbs within the double object and prepositional object constructions. The results of three experiments show that patterns of experience with particular verbs using the double object or prepositional object constructions do not have much effect on the shape of the longterm structural priming effects reported elsewhere in the literature. These findings lend support to the claim that structural priming is the result of adaptations to the language production system that occur on an abstract, structural level of representation that is separate from representations regarding the behavior of particular lexical items in particular constructions [e.g., Chang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review, 113,. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KeywordsLanguage production; Structural priming; Lexical effects Structural priming refers to the tendency for speakers (or writers) to repeat syntactic structures across utterances (Bock, 1986). As one particularly well-studied example of this phenomenon, language producers who have recently produced (or comprehended) a double object construction ("Meghan gave her mom a kiss") are more likely to produce another double object construction to describe a transfer event ("Mike sent his boss a postcard") than to produce a prepositional object construction to describe the same event ("Mike sent a postcard to his boss"; see Bock, 1986;Bock & Griffin, 2000;Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Structural priming has been observed with a range of syntactic constructions (e.g., Corley & Scheepers, 2002;Griffin & Weinstein-Tull, 2003;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998;Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000), and has been observed both in lab tasks (e.g., Bock, 1986;Pickering & Branigan, 1998) and in samples of naturally occurring speech (e.g., Gries, 2005;Weiner & Labov, 1983). Although the repetition of lexical items (e.g., verbs) across utterances has been shown to affect the strength of the priming effects that are observed (e.g., Cleland & Corresponding author. Fax: +1 850 644 7739. kaschak@psy.fsu.edu (M.P. Kaschak). HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Pickering, 2003;Pickering & Branigan, 1998), the hallmark of structural priming effects is that they arise in the absence of such lexical repetition (Bock, 1986(Bock, , 1989.Structural priming is of interest to psycholinguists (and other cognitive scientists) for several reasons. First, the presence (or absence) of structural priming between different kinds of sentences provides insight into the nature of the representations that und...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is long-term structural priming affected by patterns of experience with individual verbs?☆

Kaschak

Borreggine

2008

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…For example, one possibility is to use an incremental parser with beam search (e.g., an n-best approach). Processing difficulty is predicted at points in the input string where the current best parse is replaced by an alternative derivation, and garden-pathing occurs when the ultimately correct parse has dropped out of the beam (Jurafsky, 1996;Crocker & Brants, 2000). However, this approach is only suited to ambiguous structures.…”

Section: Study 3: Modeling Parallelism Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The basis for our modeling studies is a probabilistic parser similar to those proposed by Jurafsky (1996) and Crocker and Brants (2000). We integrate both the priming account and the copying account of parallelism into this parser, and then evaluate the predictions of the resulting models against reading time patterns such as those obtained by Frazier et al (2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A probabilistic corpus-based model of syntactic parallelism

Dubey

Keller²,

Sturt

2008

Cognition

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Work in experimental psycholinguistics has shown that the processing of coordinate structures is facilitated when the two conjuncts share the same syntactic structure (Frazier, Munn, & Clifton, 2000). In the present paper, we argue that this parallelism effect is a specific case of the more general phenomenon of syntactic priming-the tendency to repeat recently used syntactic structures. We show that there is a significant tendency for structural repetition in corpora, and that this tendency is not limited to syntactic environments involving coordination, though it is greater in these environments. We present two different implementations of a syntactic priming mechanism in a probabilistic parsing model and test their predictions against experimental data on NP parallelism in English. Based on these results, we argue that a general purpose priming mechanism is preferred over a special mechanism limited to coordination. Finally, we show how notions of activation and decay from ACT-R can be incorporated in the model, enabling it to account for a set of experimental data on sentential parallelism in German.

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“…² Resource-constrained models, which emphasize the limited cognitive resources available to the human sentence processor and the ensuing upper bounds on acceptable linguistic complexity (Gibson, 1991(Gibson, , 1998Haarmann & Kolk, 1991;Haarmann, Just & Carpenter, 1997;Henderson, 1994;Just & Carpenter, 1992;Lewis, 1993Lewis, , 1996Marcus, 1980). ² Lexico-syntactic competition models, focusing on the activation-or frequencybased competition between alternative attachment possibilities offered by syntactic building blocks retrievable from the mental lexicon (Jurafsky, 1996;Kempen & Vosse, 1989;MacDonald, Pearlmutter & Seidenberg, 1994;Stevenson, 1993Stevenson, , 1994. ² Distributed-connectionist models, based on various types of neural network architectures, in particular on Simple Recurrent Nets Elman, 1991;Tabor, Juliano & Tanenhaus, 1997).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: a computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar

2000

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We present the design, implementation and simulation results of a psycholinguistic model of human syntactic processing that meets major empirical criteria. The parser operates in conjunction with a lexicalist grammar and is driven by syntactic information associated with heads of phrases. The dynamics of the model are based on competition by lateral inhibition (`competitive inhibition'). Input words activate lexical frames (i.e. elementary trees anchored to input words) in the mental lexicon, and a network of candidate`uni®cation links' is set up between frame nodes. These links represent tentative attachments that are graded rather than all-or-none. Candidate links that, due to grammatical or`treehood' constraints, are incompatible, compete for inclusion in the ®nal syntactic tree by sending each other inhibitory signals that reduce the competitor's attachment strength. The outcome of these local and simultaneous competitions is controlled by dynamic parameters, in particular by the Entry Activation and the Activation Decay rate of syntactic nodes, and by the Strength and Strength Build-up rate of Uni®cation links. In case of a successful parse, a single syntactic tree is returned that covers the whole input string and consists of lexical frames connected by winning Uni®cation links. Simulations are reported of a signi®cant range of psycholinguistic parsing phenomena in both normal and aphasic speakers of English: (i) various effects of linguistic complexity (single versus double, center versus right-hand self-embeddings of relative clauses; the difference between relative clauses with subject and object extraction; the contrast between a complement clause embedded within a relative clause versus a relative clause embedded within a complement clause); (ii) effects of local and global ambiguity, and of word-class and syntactic ambiguity (including recency and length effects); (iii) certain dif®culty-ofreanalysis effects (contrasts between local ambiguities that are easy to resolve versus ones that lead to serious garden-path effects); (iv) effects of agrammatism on parsing performance, www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: vosse@fsw.leidenuniv.nl (T. Vosse); kempen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl (G. Kempen) in particular the performance of various groups of aphasic patients on several sentence types. q

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A Probabilistic Model of Lexical and Syntactic Access and Disambiguation

Cited by 436 publications

References 98 publications

Is long-term structural priming affected by patterns of experience with individual verbs?☆

Is long-term structural priming affected by patterns of experience with individual verbs?☆

A probabilistic corpus-based model of syntactic parallelism

Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: a computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar

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