Lexical effects on language processing are currently a major focus of attention in studies of sentence comprehension. This thematic collection provides a uniquely multi-faceted and integrated viewpoint on key aspects of lexicalist theories, drawing from the fields of theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. The focus of this stimulating volume is on a number of central topics: The discussion of foundational issues concerning the nature of the lexicon and its relationship to sentence understanding; the exploration of the relationship between syntactic and lexical processing; and the investigation of the specific content of lexical entries, especially for verbs. The authors draw on a range of methodologies, from computational modeling to corpus studies to behavioral and neuro-imaging experimental techniques. The breadth of topics and methodologies is brought together by the articulated, critical analysis of the field provided in the introduction. The research reported here elaborates both the structure and the probabilistic content of lexical representations, and meets up with work in computer science, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy on the relation between conceptual, grammatical, and statistical knowledge.

Table of Contents

Preface vii Words, numbers and all that: The lexicon in sentence understanding Suzanne Stevenson and Paola Merlo 1 The lexicon in Optimality Theory Joan Bresnan 39 Optimality•theoretic Lexical Functional Grammar Mark Johnson 59 The lexicon and the laundromat Jerry Fodor 75 Semantics in the spin cycle: Competence and performance criteria for the creation of lexical entries Amy Weinberg 85 Connectionist and symbolist sentence processing Mark Steedman 95 A computational model of the grammatical aspects of word recognition as supertagging Albert E. Kim, Bangalore Srinivas, John Trueswell 109 Incrementality and lexicalism: A treebank study Vincenzo Lombardo and Patrick Sturt 137 Modular architectures and statistical mechanisms: The case from lexical category disambiguation Matt Crocker and Steffan Corley 157 Encoding and storage in working memory during sentence comprehension Laurie A. Stowe, Rienk G. Withaar, Albertus A. Wijers, Cees A.J. Broere, Anne M.J. Paans 181 The time course of information integration in sentence processing Michael Spivey, Stanka A. Fitneva, Whitney Tabor, Sameer Ajmani 207 The lexical source of unexpressed participants and their role in sentence and discourse understanding Gail Mauner, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Alissa Melinger, Breton Bienvenue 233 Reduced relatives judged hard require constraint-based analyses Hana Filip, Michael K. Tanenhaus, Gregory N. Carlson, Paul D. Allopenna, Joshua Blatt 255 Predicting thematic role assignments in context Gerry T.M. Altmann 281 Lexical semantics as a basis for argument structure frequency biases Vera Argamann and Neal J. Pearlmutter 303 Verb sense and verb subcategorization probabilities Doug Roland and Daniel Jurafsky 325 Author index 347 Item index 355