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.
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Illustrationen
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-94-009-1600-5 (9789400916005)
DOI
10.1007/978-94-009-1600-5
Schweitzer Klassifikation
I. Introduction.- I.1 The Study of Language.- I.2 The Competence-Performance Distinction.- I.3 The Universal Parser.- I.4 A Programme of Research.- I.5 Organisation of Chapters.- II. Perspectives on Sentence Processing.- II.1 Modularity in Language Processing.- II.2 The Nature of the Empirical Evidence.- II.3 Extant Theories of Linguistic Performance.- II.4 Conclusions.- III. Principles, Parameters and Representations.- III.1 Explanation in Universal Grammar.- III.2 The Transformational Model.- III.3 Representations: Types vs. Levels.- III.4 Summary and Discussion.- IV. A Principle-Based Theory of Performance.- IV.1 The Foundations of the Processing Model.- IV.2 The Nature of Processing Complexity.- IV.3 Modularity in the Syntactic Processor.- IV.4 The Phrase Structure Module.- IV.5 The Thematic Module.- IV.6 The Chain Module: Recovering Antecedent-Trace Relations.- IV.7 Summary.- V. A Logical Model of Computation.- V.1 Principle-Based Parsing.- V.2 A Logical Model of Performance.- V.3 Control in the Syntactic Processor.- V.4 Summary and Discussion.- VI. The Specification of Modules.- VI.1 The Phrase Structure Module.- VI.2 The Chain Module.- VI.3 The Thematic Module.- VI.4 Summary.- VII. Summary and Discussion.- VII.1 A Summary of the Theory.- VII.2 Computational Properties of the Model.- VII.3 The Innate Sentence Processor.- VIII.Conclusions.- Index of Authors.- Index of Subjects.
