tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Syntactic and Semantic Factors in Processing Difficulty: An Integrated Measure"

The analysis of reading times can provide insights into the processes that underlie language comprehension, with longer reading times indicating greater cognitive load. There is evidence that the language processor is highly predictive, such that prior context allows upcoming linguistic material to be anticipated. Previous work has investigated the contributions of semantic and syntactic contexts in isolation, essentially treating them as independent factors. | Syntactic and Semantic Factors in Processing Difficulty An Integrated Measure Jeff Mitchell Mirella Lapata Vera Demberg and Frank Keller University of Edinburgh Edinburgh United Kingdom mlap@ keller@ Abstract The analysis of reading times can provide insights into the processes that underlie language comprehension with longer reading times indicating greater cognitive load. There is evidence that the language processor is highly predictive such that prior context allows upcoming linguistic material to be anticipated. Previous work has investigated the contributions of semantic and syntactic contexts in isolation essentially treating them as independent factors. In this paper we analyze reading times in terms of a single predictive measure which integrates a model of semantic composition with an incremental parser and a language model. 1 Introduction Psycholinguists have long realized that language comprehension is highly incremental with readers and listeners continuously extracting the meaning of utterances on a word-by-word basis. As soon as they encounter a word in a sentence they integrate it as fully as possible into a representation of the sentence thus far Marslen-Wilson 1973 Konieczny 2000 Tanenhaus et al. 1995 Sturt and Lombardo 2005 . Recent research suggests that language comprehension can also be highly predictive . comprehenders are able to anticipate upcoming linguistic material. This is beneficial as it gives them more time to keep up with the input and predictions can be used to compensate for problems with noise or ambiguity. Two types of prediction have been observed in the literature. The first type is semantic prediction as evidenced in semantic priming a word that is preceded by a semantically related prime or a semantically congruous sentence fragment is processed faster Stanovich and West 1981 van Berkum et al. 1999 Clifton et al. 2007 . Another example is argument .