Matthew W. Crocker - Böcker

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.

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.

This volume investigates the architecture and mechanisms which underlie the human capacity to process language. It integrates modern syntactic theory, cross-linguistic psychological evidence and modern computational techniques in constructing a model of the human sentence processing mechanism. The monograph follows the rationalist tradition, arguing the central role of modularity and universal grammar in a theory of human linguistic performance. It refines the notion of "modularity of mind", and presents a distributed model of syntactic processing which consists of modules aligned with the various informational "types" associated with modern linguistic theories. By considering psycholinguistic evidence from a range of languages, a small number of processing principles are motivated and are demonstrated to hold universally. It is also argued that the behaviour of modules, and the strategies operative within them, can be derived from an overarching "Principle of Incremental Comprehension". The book is intended for linguists, psycholinguists, computational linguists and others interested in a unified and interdisciplinary study of the human language faculty.

Computational Psycholinguistics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Study of Language investigates the architecture and mechanisms which underlie the human capacity to process language. It is the first such study to integrate modern syntactic theory, cross-linguistic psychological evidence, and modern computational techniques in constructing a model of the human sentence processing mechanism. The monograph follows the rationalist tradition, arguing the central role of modularity and universal grammar in a theory of human linguistic performance. It refines the notion of `modularity of mind', and presents a distributed model of syntactic processing which consists of modules aligned with the various informational `types' associated with modern linguistic theories. By considering psycholinguistic evidence from a range of languages, a small number of processing principles are motivated and are demonstrated to hold universally. It is also argued that the behavior of modules, and the strategies operative within them, can be derived from an overarching `Principle of Incremental Comprehension'. Audience: The book is recommended to all linguists, psycholinguists, computational linguists, and others interested in a unified and interdisciplinary study of the human language faculty.

The contributions to this volume are drawn from the interdisciplinary research c- ried out within the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB 378), a special long-term funding scheme of the German National Science Foundation (DFG). Sonderforschungsbe- ich 378 was situated at Saarland University, with colleagues from arti?cial intel- gence, computational linguistics, computer science, philosophy, psychology - and in its ?nal phases - cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. The funding covered a period of 12 years, which was split into four phases of 3 years each, ending in December of 2007. Every sub-period culminated in an intensive reviewing process, comprising written reports as well as on-site p- sentations and demonstrations to the external reviewers. We are most grateful to these reviewers for their extensive support and critical feedback; they contributed 1 their time and labor freely to the DFG, the independent and self-organized ins- tution of German scientists. The ?nal evaluation of the DFG reviewers judged the overall performance and the actual work with the highest possible mark, i.e. "excellent".