Grammatical information from the Lexicon is fundamental to sentence Essay

Grammatical information from the Lexicon is fundamental to sentence syntax - Essay Example These assumptions might also change what is thought to be involved in lexical and phrasal processing. As we discuss below, these assumptions imply a notion of lexical processing that bears considerably more responsibility for the combinatory analysis of language. Psycholinguistics has not been alone in this focus on the lexical aspects of combinatory process. Syntactic theory has increasingly moved detailed combinatory information into the lexicon, where individual lexical items are associated directly with their syntactic combinatory options. The field of applied parsing in computational linguistics has also seen a shift toward lexicalization. Many have recognized the effectiveness of coding these syntactic options as tendencies. In doing so, statistical natural language processing systems have begun to be able to recover the grammatical structure of novel sentences with astonishing accuracy. These movements in linguistics and computational linguistics touch on many of the same issues that have given rise to the development of constraint based lexicalist theories of parsing in psycholinguistics. ... Some of the best support for this view has come from on-line studies of reading, which have shown that the sub categorization and thematic role tendencies of individual verbs can guide the resolution of local syntactic ambiguity. For instance, Garnsey examined readers' abilities to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities involving classic direct object/sentence complement ambiguity. The use of lexical priming techniques in psycholinguistics has arguably been a highly effective tool for studying both the content of lexical representations and the time course with which such information is activated. For example, priming has been used to map the time course of activation of phonological and orthographic information during word recognition as well as the activation of the alternative meanings of ambiguous words. In most cases, however, the tasks used in these studies to measure participants reaction to target words are unlikely to be influenced by any hypothesized co activation of sub categorization or thematic role information, because such information is typically not relevant to successful execution of these tasks. Moreover, tasks that are sensitive to this sort of information, such as collection of reading times on individual words during sentence comprehension, have not been amenable to lexical priming techniques because the introduction of consciously perceiv ed prime word, mid sentence, would catastrophically disrupt the ongoing comprehension of the sentence as a whole. In the early 1990's, however, Rayner and colleagues introduced a covert lexical intervention technique, dubbed fast priming, which allowed for the study of lexical priming