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Published on: October 18, 2018
Constraints on sentence comprehension
1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Abstract:
The process of comprehending sentences involves the integration of a variety of different information sources, constrained by the available computational resources. This paper surveys the evidence for four types of constraints on sentence comprehension: (1) lexical constraints, (2) contextual constraints, (3) locality-based computational resource constraints, and (4) phrase-level contingent frequency constraints. These four constraints, in combination with grammatical phrase-formation information and prosody, are sufficient to explain how interpretations are constructed for sentences as they are encountered, including complexity effects in unambiguous sentences and interpretation preferences in ambiguous sentences.
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