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Title:
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Grammar, Uncertainty and Sentence Processing
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Author:
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John Hale
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.msu.edu/~jthale
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Degree Awarded:
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Johns Hopkins University
, Department of Cognitive Science
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Degree Date:
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2003
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Computational Linguistics
Syntax
Cognitive Science
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Edward Stabler
Paul Smolensky
Edward Gibson
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Abstract:
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Toward a probabilistic theory of human sentence processing, this dissertation proposes a definition of computational work done in the course of analyzing sentences generated by formal grammars. It applies the idea of \emph{entropy} from information~theory to the set of derivations compatible with an initial substring of a sentence.
Given a probabilistic grammar, this permits the set of such compatible derivations to be viewed as a random variable, and the change in derivational uncertainty from word to word to be calculated.
This definition of computational work is examined as a cognitive~model of human sentence~processing difficulty. To apply the model, a variety of existing syntactic proposals for English sentences are cast as probabilistic Generalized~Phrase~Structure~Grammars~\cite{gpsg:book} and probabilistic Minimalist~Grammars~\cite{stabler97}.
It is shown that the amount of predicted processing effort in relative clauses correlates with the Accessibility~Hierarchy of relativized grammatical relations \cite{keenan77} on a Kaynian \shortcite{kayne94} view of relative clause structure.
Results from three new sentence~reading experiments confirm the findings of \namecite{keenan87} by demonstrating effects of the Accessibility~Hierarchy on question-answering accuracy, but find only limited support for the AH in online reading times.
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