Phonological (un)certainty weights lexical activation

Spoken word recognition involves at least two basic computations. First is matching acoustic input to phonological categories (e.g. /b/, /p/, /d/). Second is activating words consistent with those phonological categories. Here we test the hypothesis that the listener's probability distribution over lexical items is weighted by the outcome of both computations: uncertainty about phonological discretisation and the frequency of the selected word(s). To test this, we record neural responses in auditory cortex using magnetoencephalography, and model this activity as a function of the size and relative activation of lexical candidates. Our findings indicate that towards the beginning of a word, the processing system indeed weights lexical candidates by both phonological certainty and lexical frequency; however, later into the word, activation is weighted by frequency alone.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted at: Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) 201

Modeling Morphological Processing in Human Magnetoencephalography

In this paper, we conduct a magnetoencephalography (MEG) lexical decision experiment and computationally model morphological processing in the human brain, especially the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) in the visual ventral stream. Five neurocomputational models of morphological processing are constructed and evaluated against human neural activities: Character Markov Model and Syllable Markov Model as amorphous models without morpheme units, and Morpheme Markov Model, Hidden Markov Model (HMM), and Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) as morphous models with morpheme units structured linearly or hierarchically. Our MEG experiment and computational modeling demonstrate that morphous models outperformed amorphous models, PCFG was most neurologically accurate among morphous models, and PCFG better explained nested words with non-local dependencies between prefixes and suffixes. These results strongly suggest that morphemes are represented in the human brain and parsed into hierarchical morphological structures

Experimental investigations of ambiguity: the case of most

In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most. The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most, which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support of a decompositional analysis of most according to which it is a superlative construction built from a gradable predicate many or much and the superlative operator -est (Hackl, in Nat Lang Semant 17:63–98, 2009). Our evidence comes in the form of verification profiles for sentences like Most of the dots are blue which, we argue, reflect the existence of a superlative reading of most. This notably contrasts with Lidz et al.’s (Nat Lang Semant 19:227–256, 2011) results. To reconcile the two sets of data, we argue, it is necessary to take important differences in task demands into account, which impose limits on the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies

Movement from the double object construction is not fully symmetrical

A movement asymmetry arises in some languages that are otherwise symmetrical for both A- and A-bar movement in the double object construction (DOC), including Norwegian, North-West British English, and a range of Bantu languages including Zulu and Lubukusu: a Theme object can be A-bar-moved out of a Recipient (Goal) passive, but not vice versa. Our explanation of this asymmetry is based on phase theory, more specifically a stricter version of the Phase Interpretability Condition proposed by Chomsky (2001). The effect is that, in a Theme passive, a Recipient object destined for the C-domain gets trapped within the lower V-related phase by movement of the Theme. The same effect is observed in Italian, a language in which only Theme passives are possible. Moreover, a similar effect is also found in some Bantu languages in connection with object marking/agreement: object agreement with the Theme in a Recipient passive is possible, but not vice versa. We show that this, too, can be understood within the theory that we articulate

Predicative Possessives Relational Nouns and Floating Quantifiers

Green (1971) notes the apparent unacceptability of certain quantificational expressions as possessors of singular head nouns. We provide data from a range of English dialects to show that such constructions are not straightforwardly unacceptable, but there are a number of restrictions on their use. We build on Kayne’s (1993; 1994) analysis of English possessives in conjunction with considerations on floating quantifiers to explain both the types of possessive that are permitted in the relevant dialects and their distribution, which is restricted to predicative position