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Related Experiment Videos

Evidence for self-organized sentence processing: digging-in effects.

Whitney Tabor1, Sean Hutchins

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA. tabor@uconnvm.uconn.edu

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|February 26, 2004
PubMed
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Sentence processing models show "digging-in" effects, where initial incorrect syntactic choices impede reanalysis. This study confirms these effects in grammaticality judgments and reading times, supporting self-organizing models.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Psycholinguistics

Background:

  • Dynamical, self-organizing models predict "digging-in" effects in sentence processing.
  • The "digging-in" effect describes the increased difficulty of reanalysis after a parser commits to an incorrect syntactic structure.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the "digging-in" effect in sentence processing.
  • To compare the predictive power of self-organizing versus non-self-organizing models.

Main Methods:

  • Replication of grammaticality judgment studies by lengthening ambiguous regions in garden-path sentences.
  • Measurement of reading times to assess processing difficulty.
  • Empirical testing of a computational model simulating sentence parsing.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Lengthening the ambiguous region of a garden-path sentence led to a deleterious effect, confirming the "digging-in" effect.
  • Reading times showed a corresponding "digging-in" effect.
  • Making two incorrect syntactic attachments was more detrimental to processing than making one.

Conclusions:

  • The "digging-in" effect in sentence processing is robust and observable in both grammaticality judgments and reading times.
  • Self-organizing models, through self-reinforcement of node and link activations, naturally account for these effects.
  • The findings support the utility of self-organizing principles in understanding human sentence comprehension.