NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Showing all 5 results Save | Export
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Roland, Douglas; Yun, Hongoak; Koenig, Jean-Pierre; Mauner, Gail – Cognition, 2012
The effects of word predictability and shared semantic similarity between a target word and other words that could have taken its place in a sentence on language comprehension are investigated using data from a reading time study, a sentence completion study, and linear mixed-effects regression modeling. We find that processing is facilitated if…
Descriptors: Comprehension, Sentences, Semantics, Probability
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Douven, Igor; Verbrugge, Sara – Cognition, 2010
According to Adams's Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular, we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people's judgments of the…
Descriptors: Prediction, Probability, Inferences, Sentences
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Frank, Michael C.; Goldwater, Sharon; Griffiths, Thomas L.; Tenenbaum, Joshua B. – Cognition, 2010
The ability to discover groupings in continuous stimuli on the basis of distributional information is present across species and across perceptual modalities. We investigate the nature of the computations underlying this ability using statistical word segmentation experiments in which we vary the length of sentences, the amount of exposure, and…
Descriptors: Sentences, Performance Technology, Experiments, Models
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Amato, Michael S.; MacDonald, Maryellen C. – Cognition, 2010
A study combining artificial grammar and sentence comprehension methods investigated the learning and online use of probabilistic, nonadjacent combinatorial constraints. Participants learned a small artificial language describing cartoon monsters acting on objects. Self-paced reading of sentences in the artificial language revealed comprehenders'…
Descriptors: Sentences, Artificial Languages, Cartoons, Language Processing
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
Levy, Roger – Cognition, 2008
This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension,…
Descriptors: Expectation, Sentences, Figurative Language, Language Processing