Frazier - 1987 - Sentence processing A tutorial review A good theory of language processing must identify the principles determining

the analysis of the input. Minimal attachment: Do not postulate any potentially unnecessary nodes. Late closure: If grammatically permissible, attach new items in to the clause or phrase currently being processed (most recently). Says that it is no accident that the human comprehension system can be unified and viewed as the consequence of just two general strategies. Language comprehension is not the result of a haphazard collection of clues to inform analysis Minimal attachment examples: Put the apple on the towel in the box. Initially processed as put the apple on the towel because it has the simplest nodes and construction. However, in the box makes it more complicated. The minimal attachment theory predicts that you would first look at the apple on a towel and then put it on another towel and then in the box. This is in contrast to the more complex (and more nodes required) construction of put the apple on the towel meaning the apple that is on the towel (and then that apple goes in the box). A) I suppose the girl knows the answer to the physics problem -Minimal attachment because the physics problem is easily attached to knows the answer (less nodes) B) The girl knows the answer to the physics problem was correct -Non minimal because was correct makes the syntax construction more complex because physics problem is not directly attached to the answer. The reason why this takes longer to process is because there are more nodes that need to be constructed.

-Numerous studies show that lexical preferences influence some stage of language comprehension, but they do not prove it determines the initial stages of syntactic construction.

-Local lexical preferences cannot guide the construction of To whom did you say that you admitted it? because say does not have a typical role of binding the prepositional phrase and yet thats what it does. Animacy information of duck and answer does not help you determine what will come after in sentences such as John knew the answer.. and John knew the duck However, there are some cases where local relations do apply, such as the relation between teacher and taught and children and taught The teachers taught by Berlitz method passed the test. The children taught by Berlitz method passed the test. Minimal attachment says that attaching with guns to the men is trivial and there is no other way to construct this sentence. However if there was a previous sentence: The men with guns on the corner who were unarmed. Frazier argues that the reason the second sentence is difficult to process is because you are still performing minimal attachment even in the face of the prior context.

According to minimal attachment, the human sentence processor initially computes one constituent structure analysis of a sentence. -Gaps are recognized and assigned a filler on-line (the processor does not delay such decisions until the ends of the clauses or sentences but rather makes them immediately following the position of the gap). In cases of temporary ambiguity, the more recent of two potential fillers is assigned to the gap. -Modular systems state that initial information is encapsulated and processed very quickly by mandatory application of specialized routines which deal exclusively with inputs from that domain, producing a shallow output. -Thematic frames may influence ongoing syntactic analysis but not the selection of an initial syntactic analysis. -Proposes three systems: lexical access system, constituent structure system, and thematic system. -Proposes a distinction between a syntactic subsystem concerned with structure building and a subsystem concerned with the identification or evaluation of relations between phrases in the constituent structure representation. Fodor proposes one thing. -States that the simplicity of the principles outlined in the paper are the most impressive evidence for the current modular approach

Questions

Interesting that the assumption that a theory must be able to generate all cases by which someone choses a certain processing strategy is what made this theory inflexible and not completely generalizable. Simplicity of rules is not evidence (as the author claims it is). It can only ever be suggestive of being on the right path (Occams razor) The problem is that there is no physical explanation put forward to describe how this process takes place. The only guiding principle is the intuitive notion that it would be nice for the human processor to have a generalizable rule system for it to flow each time it encounters a sentence. This is a consequence of treating the brain like computer rather than a system which has a different architecture. Computers work in a serial fashion, just like constituent structure analysis. But a brain is not a computer, it has a parallel architecture. This is a case where paying attention to the structure of the brain would have given a better outcome rather than making an unfounded assumption that it works like a computer.