Compositionality in a Parallel Architecture for Language Processing

Baggio, Giosué

doi:10.1111/cogs.12949

Cited by 24 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 87 publications

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“…We note that compositional processing is not an all-or-none phenomenon (Baggio, 2021;Titone & Connine, 1999), and idioms and syntactic prose are not processed entirely non-compositionally.…”

Section: Background Of the Present Studymentioning

confidence: 69%

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Effects of Structure and Meaning on Cortical Tracking of Linguistic Units in Naturalistic Speech

Coopmans

Hoop

Hagoort

et al. 2022

Neurobiology of Language

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Recent research has established that cortical activity ‘tracks’ the presentation rate of syntactic phrases in continuous speech, even though phrases are abstract units which do not have direct correlates in the acoustic signal. We investigated whether cortical tracking of phrase structures is modulated by the extent to which these structures compositionally determine meaning. To this end, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) of 38 native speakers who listened to naturally spoken Dutch stimuli in different conditions, which parametrically modulated the degree to which syntactic structure and lexical semantics determine sentence meaning. Tracking was quantified through mutual information between the EEG data and either the speech envelopes or abstract annotations of syntax, all of which were filtered in the frequency band corresponding to the presentation rate of phrases (1.1–2.1 Hz). Overall, these mutual information analyses showed stronger tracking of phrases in regular sentences than in stimuli whose lexical-syntactic content is reduced, but no consistent differences in tracking between sentences and stimuli which contained a combination of syntactic structure and lexical content. While there were no effects of compositional meaning on the degree of phrase-structure tracking, analyses of event-related potentials elicited by sentence-final words did reveal meaning-induced differences between conditions. Our findings suggest that cortical tracking of structure in sentences indexes the internal generation of this structure, a process which is modulated by the properties of its input, but not by the compositional interpretation of its output.

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Section: Background Of the Present Studymentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Most current neurobiological models of language processing assume structure building to be a lexicalized process (Baggio, 2021;Hagoort, 2005Hagoort, , 2017Martin, 2020;Matchin & Hickock, 2020).…”

Section: Cortical Tracking Of Lexicalized Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Structure and Meaning on Cortical Tracking of Linguistic Units in Naturalistic Speech

Coopmans

Hoop

Hagoort

et al. 2022

Neurobiology of Language

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“…For instance, the second reduction ( r N ) may still be ongoing when the third reduction ( l N ) is taking place. In fact, it is quite likely that these neuronal mechanisms are strongly parallel (Baggio, 2021). With this, we have an model of the neuronal oscillations -morphisms operating on distinct timescales.…”

Section: Illustrating Enrichmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A mathematical neural process model of language comprehension, from syllable to sentence

Kaushik,

Martin

2022

Preprint

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Human beings effortlessly perceive structural meaning from a biophysical signal such as speech or sign. An explanation of the processes underlying this phenomenon needs to account for both the properties of the signal, as well as those of the neural architecture deploying linguistic knowledge. This article approaches the question from a mathematical perspective, providing a neurophysiologically grounded explanation of the process underlying linguistic structure building in the brain. For defining the properties of the signal, we rely on the mathematical linguistics of DisCoCat (Coecke et al. 2010), a syntactically sensitive formalism of distributional meaning that makes no claims about the neural processing underlying sentence comprehension. The neuroscientific architecture derives from a cue-integration model of language comprehension (Martin 2020). In it, the brain infers the latent structure of a cue or signal based on knowledge of the language, through a process of neural coordinate transform. In this work, we demonstrate how the DisCoCat formalism can interface with the neurophysiological process model and describe how the resulting incremental process model can return a formal description at each timestep. Second, we present an extension to show how structure building from phonological segments to syllables can be modelled within a categorial grammar setup, integrating it with our process model. Third, we introduce a temporal metric interpretation on the transformations occuring within the extended DisCoCat formalism for each level of representation - also known as categorical enrichment. As a result of this specification, we obtain a mechanistic account of neural oscillatory readouts during language comprehension.

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“…We should note that the properties we described above are properties of a cognitive capacity, which can be expressed in varying degrees in natural languages. In addition, the faculty of language is capable of assigning strongly compositional interpretations to most sentences, as is required to derive the multiple interpretations of structurally ambiguous sentences, but it can assign other interpretations as well (e.g., to non-decomposable idioms; Baggio, 2021;Jackendoff, 2002). In other words, we listed properties that a model of (the faculty of) language must have, even though these need not be found in all constructions in all languages.…”

Section: Properties Of Syntactic Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Hierarchical structure in language and action: A formal comparison

Coopmans¹,

Kaushik²,

Martin³

2021

Preprint

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Since the cognitive revolution, language and action have been compared as cognitive systems, with cross-domain convergent views recently gaining renewed interest in biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Language and action are both combinatorial systems whose mode of combination has been argued to be hierarchical, combining elements into constituents of increasingly larger size. This structural similarity has led to the suggestion that they rely on shared cognitive and neural resources. In this paper, we compare the conceptual and formal properties of hierarchy in language and action using tools from category theory. We show that the strong compositionality of language requires a formalism that describes the mapping between sentences and their syntactic structures as an order-embedded Galois connection, while the weak compositionality of actions only requires a monotonic mapping between action sequences and their goals, which we model as a monotone Galois connection. We aim to capture the different system properties of language and action in terms of the distinction between hierarchical sets and hierarchical sequences, and discuss the implications for the way both systems are represented in the brain.

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Compositionality in a Parallel Architecture for Language Processing

Cited by 24 publications

References 87 publications

Effects of Structure and Meaning on Cortical Tracking of Linguistic Units in Naturalistic Speech

Effects of Structure and Meaning on Cortical Tracking of Linguistic Units in Naturalistic Speech

A mathematical neural process model of language comprehension, from syllable to sentence

Hierarchical structure in language and action: A formal comparison

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