Abstract
To formalize and analyze the role of animacy information in on-line sentence comprehension, results of several on-line studies are compared and analyzed according to a new model of incremental optimization of interpretation. This model makes use of violable ranked constraints. To analyze the use of animacy information a set of four constraints is needed, namely Case, Selection, Precedence, and Prominence. It is shown that the pattern of constraint violations of these four constraints provide sufficient information to reflect the on-line effects of language comprehension studies in which animacy information played a crucial role. More specifically, the evaluation of sentences in which either case information or animacy information in combination with the selection restrictions of the verb were used, showed that the model can account for the ambiguity resolution with both sorts of information. The model was also successfully applied to the on-line processing of a more complex object relative structure in English.
The research reported here was supported by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (grants #220-70-003 to the PIONIER project Case Cross-linguistically and #051-02-070 to the Cognition project Conflicts in Interpretation), which is gratefully acknowledged.
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Lamers, M., de Hoop, H. (2005). Animacy Information in Human Sentence Processing: An Incremental Optimization of Interpretation Approach. In: Christiansen, H., Skadhauge, P.R., Villadsen, J. (eds) Constraint Solving and Language Processing. CSLP 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3438. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11424574_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11424574_10
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