The document discusses psycholinguistics focused on sentence processing, outlining various models of parsing such as two-stage and constraint-based models, and exploring factors like ambiguity, context effects, and parsing long-distance dependencies. It covers the implications of these models on understanding how people interpret sentences and highlights criticisms and alternative parsing theories. Overall, it emphasizes that parsing is a vital process influenced by various linguistic and contextual cues.

1. PsycholinguisticsandCognitiveProcesses
SentenceProcessing
by: Muhammad Saleem

2. Outline
 Models of Parsing: Two-Stage Models
 Models of Parsing: Constraint-Based Models
 Story context effects
 Subcategory frequency effects
 Cross-linguistic frequency data
 Semantic effects
 Prosody
 Visual context effects
 Interim Summary
 Argument Structure Hypothesis
 Limitations, Criticisms, and Some Alternative Parsing
Theories
 Construal
 Race-based parsing
 Good-enough parsing
 Parsing Long-Distance
 Dependencies
 Summary and Conclusions
 Test Yourself

5. Introduction
 When people speak, they produce sequences of
words. When people listen or read, they also deal with
sequences of words. Speakers systematically
organize those sequences of words into phrases,
clauses, and sentences.
 The study of syntax involves discovering the cues that
languages provide that show how words in sentences
relate to one another.
 The study of syntactic parsing involves discovering
how comprehenders use those cues to determine how
words in sentences relate to one another during the
process of interpreting sentence.

6. Parsing
Parsing means to breaking down a
sentence into its component parts
so that the meaning of the sentence
can be understood.
This can either be the category of
words (Nouns, Pronouns, verbs,
adjectives. Etc.)
Or other elements such as verbs
tense (present, past, future)

8. Sentence
processing
 Refers to the subfield of psycholinguistics
focusing on the interpretation of
sentences (Cokal, 2018).

9. Phrase
structure tree
(or tree
diagram)
In a phrase structure tree, the labels,
like NP, VP, and S, are called nodes
and the connections between the
different nodes form branches.
The patterns of nodes and branches
show how the words in the sentence
are grouped together to form
phrases and clauses.

11. Onebasic
question
language scientists have asked is, are
ambiguous sentences harder to
understand than less ambiguous
sentences that express about the
same meaning? In other words, does
ambiguity impose processing costs on
the listener (or reader)?

12. Answer
 The short answer to this question is: Yes, ambiguity
leads to longer reading times, lower comprehension
accuracy, and different patterns of brain activity in
comprehenders than unambiguous sentences that say
the same thing (see, e.g., Frazier & Rayner, 1982;
Kutas, van Petten, & Kluender, 2006; Trueswell,
Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994).
 The longer and more complicated answer to the
question is: There are cases where ambiguity doesn’t
produce noticeable processing costs, and ultimately
processing cost depends on a variety of factors,
including what information the listener has just
processed, and what contextual information is
available (see Traxler & Tooley, 2007, for a review).

13. Gardenpath
model
 Garden path model or the two stage model Parsing
takes two distinct processing stages or steps.
 Frazier’s garden path theory is considered a two-stage
model of syntactic parsing, because she proposes that
syntactic parsing takes place in two distinct processing
stages or steps.
 The first stage is analyzing the incoming sequence of
words to determine what categories of words it belongs.
 Second is building a syntactic structure for the
sequence.
 The word category is used in the initial structure
building process.

14. Traxler

15. Gardenpath
theory
Two main points to remember in
garden path theory.
First, garden path theory assumes
that people can only build one
syntactic structure at a time.
Second, garden path theory says
the predominant principle that the
parser relies on is simplicity.

17. Constraint-
basedmodel
The second model is the constraint- based
model
 Constraint-based parsers are capable of
pursuing multiple structural possibilities
simultaneously.
 Constraint-based parsers draw on much
wider variety of cues to decide what
structure to build and the relative
emphasis to place on each alternative
structure.
 Constraint-based parsers are often
referred to as one-stage models because
lexical, syntactic and semantic processes
are all taking place simultaneously.

18. Storycontext
effects
 Story context effect uses the information
in the sentence to make semantic
assumption or a mini story based on the
information given in the sentence.

19. Subcategory
frequency effects
Words, as it is dynamic, it can
provide more information.
For instance a specific category
such as -verbs - can either be
intransitive, transitive,
ditransitive.

20. Cross-linguistic
frequencydata
 Parsing focus has been entirely on
English.
 Studies have been done in other
languages that enlightens how people
parse and interpret sentences.
 Cross-linguistic research (research that
compares how different languages are
processed).
 Structural preferences in different
language match the frequencies with
which different structure occur in those
languages.

21. Semantic
effects
Semantic (meaning) information
associated with specific words in
the sentences.
Constraint based model differs
from the garden path because, the
garden path theory ignores
semantic information.

22. Prosody
Prosody is defined as the rhythm,
stress, and intonation of speech -
provides important information
beyond a sentence's literal word
meaning.
Example: "Yeah, that
was a great movie."

23. Twocategories of
speechpatterns in
prosody
 Non-linguistic prosody -provides cues to
the speaker's general mental state.
Answers the question, "Is the speaker
happy, angry or depressed.
 Linguistic prosody-provides cues to how
the words are organized into
phrases and clauses.

24. Visualcontext
Effects
 Visual context effects states that
information outside language processing
system can influence syntactic parsing.
 Information in the visual scene will
increase the parsers preference for a
complex syntactic structure.

27. Interim
Summary
 Sentence interpretation involves a parser
that makes decisions about how words in
the sentences relate to one another.
 Two models of parsing.
 We also learned that human behaviors
are not fully compatible with the garden
path theory.
 As a result, some studies have favored
the use of constraint-based versions of
sentence processing theory.

28. Limitations,
Criticisms, and
SomeAlternative
Parsing Theories
 The first criticism is based on the
suggestion that the parser may not
always favor likely structures over
less likely, but simpler structures
(e.g., Clifton, Kennison, & Albrecht,
1997).
 The second criticism of the constraint-
based approach relates to the absence
of evidence that sentences with simple
syntactic structures are ever hard to
process.

29. Construal
 The construal account is essentially a
refinement of the classic garden path
parsing theory (Frazier & Clifton, 1996).
 Construal retains the idea that parsing
occurs in discrete stages, but it adopts
the idea that context can influence which
structure the parser prefers and the idea
that the parser can sometimes build
multiple structures simultaneously.

30. Race-based
parsing
 The race-based account represents a
different refinement of the parallel
processing approach to parsing (Traxler
et al., 1998; van Gompel, Pickering, &
Traxler, 2000).
 Like constraint based parsers, the race-
based account stipulates that the parser
can build multiple syntactic structures in
parallel. And like the garden path and
construal accounts, the race-based
approach to parsing advocates a two-
stage process.

31. Race-based
parsing
Example
This morning, I shot an elephant in
my pajamas. (minimal attachment)
This morning, I shot an elephant
with great big tusks. (non-minimal
attachment)
This morning, I shot a poacher
with a rifle. (ambiguous)

32. Good-enough
parsing
 Fernanda Ferreira’s good-enough parsing
hypothesis represents a recent, more
radical departure from the classical
approaches to parsing and interpretation
(Christianson, Williams, Zacks, &
Ferreira, 2006; Ferreira, Bailey, &
Ferraro, 2002; Ferreira, Christianson, &
Hollingworth, 2001; Ferreira & Patson,
2007).

33. Good-enough
parsing
Good-enough parsing starts by
asking, “What good is parsing,
anyway?
Do we really need it?”
The short answer to these
questions is:
Sometimes we don’t need syntax
and parsing at all.
For example, if you know someone
is communicating about cheese, a
mouse, and an act of eating,

34. Good-enough
parsing
The words by themselves tell you
everything you need to know, and
there is no need to compute
syntactic structure to recover the
speaker’s intentions or the event
that inspired the act of
communication.

35. Parsing Long-
Distance
Dependencies
 We have been considering the processing
of sentences where the words that go
together to make phrases appear right
next to one another as the sentences are
produced.
 For example, in a simple active sentence
like (68), the subject, verb, and direct
object are all adjacent to one another.
 (68) The girl chased the boy.

36. Parsing Long-
Distance
Dependencies
 Thus, the relationships between the
words in the sentence are classified as
local dependencies.
 Many sentences have long-distance
dependencies (sometimes called non-
local, sometimes called unbounded
dependencies), where the words that
have close syntactic relationships appear
in separate locations in the sentence.
 Sentence (69) has a meaning very similar
to sentence (68), but instead of having all
local dependencies, it has some long-
distance dependencies.
 (69) It was the boy whom the girl chased.

37. Parsing Long-
Distance
Dependencies
In sentence (69) the boy is the
object argument of the verb chased,
but rather than coming right after
the verb (which is the normal
pattern in English), the boy
appears before the verb chased.
As a result, the boy and chased
together form a long-distance
dependency.

38. Parsing Long-
Distance
Dependencies

39. Summaryand
Conclusions
 Parsing is an important aspect of
interpreting sentences. This chapter has
reviewed evidence for and against two-stage
and one-stage theories of human parsing
processes.
 The available evidence suggests that the
parser makes use of a wide variety of
information very quickly as it is figuring out
how words in sentences relate to one
another. As a result, many researchers have
adopted some version of the constraint-based
processing framework to explain how parsing
is accomplished.

40. Summaryand
Conclusions
 They view syntactic parsing as resulting
from the operation of distributed neural
networks.
 Alternative parsing accounts agree with
some of the theoretical claims made by
constraint-based advocates, such as
simultaneous consideration of different
syntactic structures, but without
agreeing that current neural network
models capture all of the key aspects of
people’s parsing processes.

41. Summaryand
Conclusions
The chapter also described the
difference between local and long-
distance dependencies and showed
that the direct-association
hypothesis could explain how both
local and long-distance
dependencies are parsed and
account for experimental results in
each domain.

42. TestYourself
 Describe the relationship between
sentence structure and sentence
meaning. How does the way that we
organize words in sentences influence the
meanings we assign to those sentences?
 Describe how long-distance dependencies
differ from local dependencies. Describe
two accounts of long-distance dependency
processing.

43. Thinkaboutit
 Draw phrase-structure diagrams for the
following sentences. (Hint: (c) may be
better represented using a dependency
diagram than a phrase-structure tree.
 Ask your professor for help if you get
stuck.)
 a. Hungry monkeys ate tasty bananas.
 b. Bananas tasty monkeys hungry ate.
 c. Tasty bananas ate monkeys hungry.

44. Note
 Although some theorists contend that
phrase structure representations apply
universally, they may not be particularly
good descriptions for languages that
allow words from different phrases to be
intermixed. These scrambling languages
may be better described in terms of
dependencies, rather than phrase
structures (Evans & Levinson, 2009).

45. References
 Adams, B. C., Clifton, C., Jr., & Mitchell, D. C. (1998).
Lexical guidance in sentence processing. Psychonomic
Bulletin & Review, 5, 265–270.
 Altmann, G. T. M., Garnham, A., & Dennis, Y. (1992).
Avoiding the garden path: Eye movements in context.
Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 685–712.
 Altmann, G. T. M., Garnham, A., & Henstra, J. A.
(1994). Effects of syntax in human sentence parsing:
Evidence against a structure-based proposal
mechanism. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 209–216.
 Altmann, G. T. M., & Steedman, M. (1988). Interaction
with context during human sentence processing.
Cognition, 30, 191–238.

46. Links
 Sentence Processing. Garden Path and
Constraint-Based Model. – YouTube
 An Introduction to Psycholinguistics with Dr.
Matt Traxler (Chasing Leviathan) #podcast
#language – YouTube
 noc19-hs14 Lecture 25 - Parsing Sentences - 4
(youtube.com)

47. Thankyou Questions, please.