Modern intelligent agents will need to learn the actions that humans perform. They will need to recognize these actions when they see them and they will need to perform these actions themselves. We want to propose a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and consists of…

This paper discusses the validity and role of linguistic theory in terms of philosophy and logic and considers the relationship among these fields of human knowledge. The main objective of linguistic science is to discover the composition laws actually used by speech communities at any given moment in history. Linguistics is therefore not…

The author endeavors to penetrate the "mists o f mentalistic myth" which enshroud the "very real, solid, and substantial results of generative or transformational linguistics." In attempting to clarify and clear up misunderstandings about theories of grammar as put forth by Chomsky (whose practice, the author feels, is "superior to his description…

The right roof constraint'' is the assumption that rightward-movement rules are always upward-bounded; see J.R. Ross' dissertation, Constraints on Variables in Syntax'' (MIT, 1967). (RS)

This report reviews the psychological and psycholinguistic literature from the last decade that deals with memory for sentences. It is concluded that the encoded representation of a sentence reflects both syntactic and semantic content, with the semantic content being far less transient. (Author)

Section I of this report discusses the theoretical issues relating to the development of syntax recognition routines based on psychological models of human speech recognition and reviews the relevant psychological literature. The research reported deals with attempts to relate various syntactic variables to measures of the perceptual complexity of…

Research supported in part by a grant from the United States Public Health Service. (DD)

The difficulty of obtaining usable information about the mental processes involved in the use of language has been a major obstacle in the design of effective writing programs. The antipsychological, behavioristic bias of American linguistics, which prevented any study of the deeper mental processes of language production, was remediated in part…

A study on sentence processing involving rehearsal, response initiation, and mental transformation required the subject to perform a secondary task concurrently with transformation of a sentence previously given. A secondary task interruption technique was used to allow inferences as to where the planning occurs by measuring increases in task time…

Intended as an introduction to psycholinguistics from the linguist's point of view, this book addresses itself to three main topics: the innateness of language, the relationship of linguistic knowledge to language usage, and the comprehension and production of speech. In 12 chapters, the book discusses the nature of language development, the…

This course was part of a tutorial focusing on the state of computational semantics, i.e., the state of work on natural language within the artificial intelligence (AI) paradigm. The discussion in the course centered on the philosophers Richard Montague and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The course was divided into three sections: (1)…