The architectures and mechanisms underlying language processing form one important part of the general structure of cognition. This book, written by leading experts in the field, brings together linguistic, psychological and computational perspectives on some of the fundamental issues. Several general introductory chapters offer overviews on important psycholinguistic research frameworks and highlight both shared assumptions and controversial issues. Subsequent chapters explore syntactic and lexical mechanisms; statistical and connectionist models of language understanding; the crucial importance of linguistic representations in explaining behavioural phenomena; evidence from a variety of studies and methodologies concerning the interaction of syntax and semantics; and the implications for cognitive architecture. The book concludes with a set of contributions on select issues of interpretation, including quantification, focus and anaphora in language understanding. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing will appeal to students and scholars alike as a comprehensive and timely survey of recent work in this interdisciplinary area.
Features:
• Recognized authorities in the field as contributors
• Fast-moving field of interest both to academics and to applied researchers (machine language applications) • Book is designed to appeal across disciplines (linguistics, psychology, cognitive sciences, computer science)
Contents:
Preface
1. Architectures and mechanisms in sentence comprehension
Part I. Frameworks
2. Evaluating models of human sentence processing
3. Specifying architectures for language processing: process, control, and memory in parsing and interpretation
4. Modeling thematic and discourse context effects with a multiple constraints approach: implications for the architecture of the language comprehension system
5. Late closure in context: some consequences for parsimony
Part II. Syntactic and Lexical Mechanisms
6. The modular statistical hypothesis: exploring lexical category ambiguity
7. Lexical syntax and parsing architecture
8. Constituency, context, and connectionism in syntactic parsing
Part III. Syntax and Semantics
9. On the electrophysiology of language comprehension: implications for the human language system
10. Parsing and incremental understanding during reading
11. Syntactic attachment and anaphor resolution: the two sides of relative clause attachment
12. Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics
Part IV. Interpretation
13. On interpretation: minimal 'lowering'
14. Focus effects associated with negative quantifiers
15. Constraints and mechanisms in theories of anaphor processing
Author index
Subject index
