Parsing verb-final clauses in German: Garden-path and ERP effects modeled by a parallel dynamic parser

Vosse, T. G., & Kempen, G. (2008). Parsing verb-final clauses in German: Garden-path and ERP effects modeled by a parallel dynamic parser. In B. Love, K. McRae, & V. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference on the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 261-266). Washington: Cognitive Science Society.
Experimental sentence comprehension studies have shown that superficially similar German clauses with verb-final word order elicit very different garden-path and ERP effects. We show that a computer implementation of the Unification Space parser (Vosse & Kempen, 2000) in the form of a localist-connectionist network can model the observed differences, at least qualitatively. The model embodies a parallel dynamic parser that, in contrast with existing models, does not distinguish between consecutive first-pass and reanalysis stages, and does not use semantic or thematic roles. It does use structural frequency data and animacy information.
Publication type
Proceedings paper
Publication date
2008

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