Sentence Processing
Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Sentence Processing
LIN102H1F – Lecture 6
July 22nd, 2021
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
I Assignment #2 is due tonight
I Two typos have been announced today
I Assignment #1 review tomorrow
I Weekly Q&A session (1-2pm)
I Midterm review session
I 7-9 on Monday July 26
I Accommodation requests for the midterm
I ATS
I Assignmnent #2 answer key will be posted on Monday afternoon
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Clausal structure
CP
C
complementizer
TP
DP
subject
T’
T
modals
VP
predicate
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
[ this [ girl in the red coat ] ]
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Principles and Parameters
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Go to Slide #30 – #51 of Lecture #5 slides
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Ambiguity
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
I A grammar ≈ a blue print for language use
I a model of tacit knowledge of categories and combinatorial principles that speakers
are believed to be following
I A grammar is not in and of itself a model of the cognitive process via which
language is actually used
I Sentence processing:
• How are strings parsed into structures?
• What principle govern parsing?
• When and why does processing break down? …etc.
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Psycholinguistics
The study of the psychological and neurological factors involved in the perception,
production and acquisition of language
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
I Syntax:
I “discovering the cues that languages provide that show how words in
sentences relate to one another”
• Data: syntactic patterns and grammaticality judgments
• +To develope abstract grammatical models that will generate all and only
grammatical structures
I Syntactic parsing:
I “discovering how comprehenders use those cues to determine how
words in sentences relate to one another during the process of
interpreting a sentence”
• Data: experimentally controlled measures of observable human behaviour
(e.g., reading times, comprehension errors, eye-gaze) and brain patterns (e.g.,
MEG, EEG, fMRI)
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Ambiguity
When one string can correspond to more than one structure
I Lexical:
I “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana,“ – Marx
I Morphological:
I [unlock]able] vs. [un[lockable]]
I Syntactic:
I Franny saw the man with the binoculars
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
More examples…
I Rumours about NHL referees getting ugly
I Two spies sentenced to life in Alberta
I Stolen painting found by tree
I Two sisters reunited after 18 years in checkout counter
I Owners cannot be required to stop barking
I 11 men needed to feed python
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Ambiguity
The same string can be parsed into more than one structure
⇓
I Is it harder to process than if a string only allows one parse?
I Is one the structures easier to process than the others?
⇓
Does ambiguity impose processing costs?
I longer reading times
I lower comprehension accuracy
I different patterns of brain activity
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Two types of ambiguity
global ambiguity local ambiguity
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Franny saw the man with the binoculars
⇓
#1. Franny saw the man with the binoculars
#2. Franny saw the man with the binoculars
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Two types of ambiguity
global ambiguity local ambiguity
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
→ → →
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
→ → →
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
→ → →
While Frank was dressing himself the baby played on the floor.
dress1, V[ DP] X
dress2, V X
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
→ → →
While Frank was dressing himself the baby played on the floor.
dress1, V[ DP] X
dress2, V X
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
→ → →
While Frank was dressing himself the baby played on the floor.
dress1, V[ DP] X
dress2, V X
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
CP
C TP
CP
C
while
TP
DP
Franny
T’
T
+past
VP
was dressing the baby
TP
?? T’
T
+past
VP
played on the floor
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
CP
C TP
CP
C
while
TP
DP
Franny
T’
T
+tense
VP
was dressing
TP
DP
the baby
T’
T
+tense
VP
played on the floor
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Reading time
The longer its takes people to understand part of a sentence, the greater the
processing load thta part oft he sentence imposes
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
I Q. Which parts of the ambiguous sentence are difficult to process?
a. While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
b. While Frank was dressing himself the baby played on the floor.
Frazier & Rayner 2002, Traxler 2002, 2005
Reading times are the same for baby in both ambiguous and unambiguous sen-
tences
+People slow down on the verb played
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
I Q. Which parts of the ambiguous sentence are difficult to process?
a. While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
b. While Frank was dressing himself the baby played on the floor.
Frazier & Rayner 2002, Traxler 2002, 2005
Reading times are the same for baby in both ambiguous and unambiguous sen-
tences
+People slow down on the verb played
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
I Q. Which parts of the ambiguous sentence are difficult to process?
a. While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
b. While Frank was dressing himself the baby played on the floor.
Frazier & Rayner 2002, Traxler 2002, 2005
Reading times are the same for baby in both ambiguous and unambiguous sen-
tences
+People slow down on the verb played
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Observation
Listeners/Readers are making parsing decisions before they have enough infor-
mation to be sure that they are right (Foss & Hakes 1982, Just & Carpenter
1980)
Incremental Parsing
“[P]eople do as much interpretive work as they can, based on partial information,
and making possibly incorrect assumptions, rather than waiting until they have all
the information they need to be certain of making the correct decision” (Sedivy)
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Observation
Listeners/Readers are making parsing decisions before they have enough infor-
mation to be sure that they are right (Foss & Hakes 1982, Just & Carpenter
1980)
Incremental Parsing
“[P]eople do as much interpretive work as they can, based on partial information,
and making possibly incorrect assumptions, rather than waiting until they have all
the information they need to be certain of making the correct decision” (Sedivy)
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
While Frank was dressing the baby played on the floor.
+ Garden path sentences
“Metaphorically, they lead you down the garden path and leave you stranded there so
that you have to make your way back to the beginning and start over”
I Listeners initially build the wrong structure for some temporarily ambiguous
sentences
I Revise their initial syntactic (structural) and semantic (meaning) analyses
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Principles and Parameters Ambiguity
Syntactic parsing
A mental process or set of processes that takes sequences of words and organizes
them into hierarchical structures (similar to those in the preceding diagrams).
I Syntactic structures: a way of keeping track of the relationships between words
I Syntactic parser: determines how words in sentences relate to one another. The
syntactic structures, and our diagrams, are one way of keeping track of these
relationships so we’ll continue to use those. But more neutrally, a syntactic parser,
or simply parser, is a mechanism that carries out processes that identify
relationships between words in sentences.
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Principles and Parameters
Ambiguity