******* Language, Cognition, and Computation Lecture Series *******

 
Title                      Top-down and bottom-up influences in human language comprehension

Speaker                Ted Gibson, Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Linguistics and Philosophy

Date                      Tuesday, December 7 , 2004

Time                      3:00pm

Location                E15-070 (Bartos Theater)

Abstract

In this talk, I will summarize recent language processing data from our lab that
explore the influence of a variety of factors on human language comprehension,
including syntactic structure, working memory, lexical frequency, and discourse
context. Experimental evidence for a number of hypotheses will be summarized
including:

(1) Local connections between syntactic / semantic dependents are easier to
process than more distant connections. An interesting open question in this
domain is how to quantify distance: words? time? interfering similar elements?
the complexity of the intervening discourse structure?

(2) The human sentence processor is sensitive to syntactic expectations that are
relatively certain to occur, such as a verb following a sequence like "The
claim that the baseball player would hold out for more money ...". The greater
the number of open expectations, the greater the local processing load.

(3) The human sentence processor is sensitive to the unigram lexical frequencies
of words. For example, the word "that" is 78% complementizer; 11% determiner;
11% pronoun in large corpora of written text. The high bias of complementizers
affects people's processing of this word, even in environments where
complementizers are virtually impossible, e.g., "I visited that hotel last
week."

Data from multiple languages will be summarized, including data from English,
Japanese and Chinese.

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